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THE  ATONING  LIFE 


^^^^ 

THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

NBW  YORK  •    BOSTON   •   CHICAGO 
ATLANTA  •    SAN   FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN  &  CO.,  Limited 

LONDON  •    BOMBAY  •    CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE  MACMILLAN  CO.  OF  CANADA,  Ltd. 

TORONTO 


THE  ATONING.  LIFE/ 


BY 


HENRY   SYLVESTER   NASH 

srpr: 


PROFESSOR    OF    NEW    TESTAMENT    INTERPRETATION    IN 
-^  THE    EPISCOPAL   THEOLOGICAL    SCHOOL   AT   CAMBRIDOB 


Weto  gorfe 

THE  MACMILLAN   COMPANY 

1908 

ML  rights  reserved 


lOo/c. 


COPTKIOHT,   1908, 

bt  the  macmillan  company. 


Set  up  and  elcctrotyped.    Published  April,  1908. 


yortooon  9rtt§ 

J.  8.  Cushlng  Co.  —  Berwick  <k  Smith  Co. 

Norwood,  Mass.,  U.S.A. 


THE  FRIENDS 

WHO   HAVE  MADE  LIFE  SPACIOUS 
AND   SEABCHINO 


PREFACE 

This  little  book  has  some  faults  whereof  its  author 
is  keenly  aware,  and  others  that  he  cannot  know.  But 
the  reader  is  asked  to  remember  that  it  does  not  set 
out  to  become  a  chapter  in  systematic  theology.  Its 
aim  is  to  make  clear  the  lines  of  approach  to  the 
Atonement.  One  of  the  pressing  needs  of  minister 
and  layman  alike  is  a  vital  theology  that  springs  from 
life  and,  returning  quickly  to  the  life  out  of  which  it 
sprang,  gives  form  and  clarity  to  experience.  The 
hope  that  this  little  book  may  help  some  of  his 
brethren  toward  that  goal  gives  the  author  the  courage 
to  pubUsh  it. 


[vii] 


O  Grod,  our  great  Companion,  lead  us,  day  by  day, 
deeper  into  the  mystery  of  life,  and  make  us  inter- 
preters of  life  to  our  fellows,  through  Jesus  Christ 
our  Lord. 


iTiii] 


CONTENTS 


OHAP.  PAO> 

I.  The  Springhead  of  Wonder     ...  1 

n.  The  Proving-Ground  of  Reality      .         .  14 

ni.  DiviNB  AND  Human  Freedom     ...  27 

IV.  The  Sovereign  Will  called  Faith  .         .  42 

V.  Law  the  Final  Problem  of  Life      .         ,  57 

VI.  The  Mystery  of  Pleasure        ...  74 

Vn.  The  Mystery  of  Pain       ....  90 

VIII.  Forgiveness  and  Law        ....  107 

IX.     The  Atoning  Life 124 

X.  The  Healing  Question     ....  140 


[ix] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

CHAPTER  I 

THE   SPRINGHEAD    OF   WONDER 

WHEN  we  have  gone  deep  into  life  and  when, 
our  youthful  illusions  about  ourselves  and 
our  world  having  been  shattered,  the  hand 
of  Christ  lifts  us  out  of  the  mire,  sets  our  feet  on  the 
rock,  and  orders  our  goings,  we  find  within  our  own 
being  a  spring  of  wonder  and  self-enjoyment  whose 
flow  all  the  forces  of  the  world  cannot  stop.    The 
follower  of  Jesus,  as  a  man  redeemed,  finds  God  in 
his  heart,  God  in  his  plenitude  of  power  and  grace. 
His  soul  trembles  in  the  presence  of  the  Almighty. 
The  infinitude  of  the  divine  being  so  overpowers  him 
that  his  mind  almost  swoons.    The  beauty  of  God  fills 
him  with  ecstasy  and  awe. 
But  he  does  not  lose  himself  in  the  divine  presence, 
B  [1] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

The  divine  infinitude  does  not  swallow  him  up,  nor 
rob  him  of  his  self-possession.  The  nearer  he  draws 
to  God,  the  surer  becomes  his  hold  upon  himself. 
Intimacy  with  the  Almighty  gives  body  to  his  individual 
powers.  Friendship  with  the  All-knowing  One  kindles 
and  strengthens  his  little  candle  of  knowledge.  And 
in  this  union  of  the  deepening  sense  of  the  divine 
majesty  with  the  clearer  consciousness  of  self  the  foun- 
tain of  self-renewing  joy  in  life  breaks  forth  from  the 
everlasting  hills. 

.  The  man  redeemed  does  not  delude  himself  regarding 
his  own  capacity  or  the  make  of  the  society  of  which 
he  forms  a  part.  He  strives  to  see  life  steadily  and  to 
see  it  whole.  Life's  burdens  and  disappointments,  — 
he  thanks  God  that  he  has  his  full  share  of  them.  His 
own  sin  tortures  him.  He  wrestles  with  a  single  fault 
for  many  years,  and,  whenever  he  reports  the  conflict 
truly,  finds  his  adversary  still  strong.  His  work,  if  he 
dares  look  at  it,  terrifies  him  with  its  imperfections. 
To  be  on  good  terms  with  himself,  to  know  himself 
intimately  and  to  continue  to  enjoy  himself,  —  how 
may  that  be? 

|2] 


THE  SPRINGHEAD   OF  WONDER 

He  does  not  for  a  moment  separate  himself  from 
society.  In  his  searchings  after  self-knowledge  and 
self-mastery,  every  step  takes  him  deeper  into  fellow- 
ship. All  the  world's  good  is  his.  And  all  the  world's 
evil  is  his.  He  cannot  pretend  to  know  Christ  and 
dream  himself  into  some  little  heaven  whither  no  sound 
of  the  world's  evil  and  sorrow  and  shame  can  come. 
Full  salvation,  the  sense  of  the  Saviour's  mastery  over 
the  evil  in  himself  and  his  fellows,  comes  to  him  in  the 
world  or  comes  to  him  nowhere.  If  he  finds  it  hard 
to  endure  himself,  much  more  to  enjoy  himself  when 
he  lives  with  himself,  what  shall  he  do  when  he  takes 
himself  as  a  single  cell  within  the  vast  organism  of 
human  life  ?  He  dare  not  turn  monk.  That  were  too 
easy.  The  apparent  nobility  of  such  a  choice  covers 
over  the  ignobleness  of  an  awful  postponement.  To 
turn  monk  would  be  to  put  oflF  the  final  question.  He 
will  stand  fast  in  his  place  and  seek  the  saving  knowl- 
edge of  the  Lord. 

Standing  there,  the  God  and  Father  of  Jesus  Christ 
seeks  him  and  finds  him.  He  learns  that  the  deepest 
fact  of  experience  is  the  intimacy  between  God  and 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

himself.  God  the  Almighty !  God  the  Eternal !  and 
he  the  creature  of  a  day,  with  feeble  power  and  a 
knowledge  that  goes  just  far  enough  to  discover  an 
overwhelming  ignorance.  Yet  the  joy  and  the  won- 
der of  salvation !  He  and  God  are  inseparable.  He 
cannot  live  without  God.  But  God  will  not  live  with- 
out him.  The  infinitude  of  God  is  not  a  fathomless 
gulf  into  which  he  looks  and  shudders.  God  is  light. 
And  the  infinitude  of  God  lives  within  his  weakness 
and  limitations  even  as  the  might  and  majesty  of  the 
sun  live  within  the  flickering  candle.  God's  presence 
safeguards  his  right  to  be  himself,  and  his  right  to 
know  and  master  himself. 

The  religious  drift  of  our  time,  its  easy  and  instinc- 
tive motion,  is  towards  Pantheism.  For  increasing 
numbers  of  people  the  traditional  definitions  and  con- 
ceptions of  Christian  theology  have  lost  power  and 
appeal.  At  the  same  time  the  Universe  in  its  vastness 
is  pressing  hard  upon  the  mind.  The  age  of  our 
mother-earth  makes  time,  for  the  imagination,  infinite. 
The  scientific  knowledge  of  the  heavens  makes  space 
practically   infinite.    Within  the  working  infinite   of 

[4] 


THE  SPRINGHEAD  OF  WONDER 

time  and  space  men  are  as  bare  specks  or  dots.    To 
use  Pope's  lines, 

"  As  bubbles  on  the  sea  of  matter  born, 
They  rise,  they  break,  and  to  that  sea  return." 

Now  Pantheism  is  like  the  sick  lion  in  the  Fable. 
He  sent  out  invitations  to  all  his  subjects  to  visit  him 
in  his  cave,  having  a  deep  desire  to  look  on  their  faces 
and  to  exchange  courtesies.  But  the  fox  refused  to 
go,  observing  that  all  the  tracks  turned  one  way. 
Of  all  those  who  went  to  pay  their  respects  to  his  sick 
majesty,  none  returned.  So  is  it  with  Pantheism. 
The  promise  of  individuality  within  us,  seeking  for 
its  kith  and  kin  in  the  unseen  universe  and  driven 
into  religion  to  avoid  brain-sickness  and  heart-sick- 
ness, goes  to  see  the  Absolute  and  is  devoured. 

But  in  the  Christian  view  of  the  world  individuality 
is  the  whole  stake  and  prize.  The  Christian  conscious- 
ness reconciles  the  infinitude  of  God  and  the  person- 
ality of  man.  Or,  putting  it  in  a  better  way,  in  the 
Christian  consciousness  the  individuality  of  man  is 
discovered  and  interpreted  as  the  medium  through 
which  the  divine  infinitude  is  appreciated  and  under- 

[5] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

stood.  To  the  people,  called  Christians,  who  have 
taken  Christ  for  their  souls'  Captain,  the  measureless 
spaces  and  forces  of  the  Universe,  pressing  irresistibly 
upon  the  mind,  do  but  deepen  the  wonder  of  their 
life. 

In  the  glory  of  the  stars,  in  the  might  of  the  tides, 
God  comes  near  to  the  Christian.  The  nearer  God 
comes  to  him,  the  surer  is  his  hold  on  himself.  His 
awe  of  God  gives  splendid  promise  to  his  self-knowl- 
edge. He  discovers  the  ground  of  his  individuality 
to  be  as  deep  as  God's  own  being.  In  his  own  heart 
the  divine  majesty  reveals  itself  as  the  safeguard  of 
his  rights.  For  all  his  rights,  in  other  words  all  his 
claims  on  life,  reduce  to  a  single  right,  namely,  the 
right  to  grow  in  the  knowledge  and  mastery  of  self. 
And  the  God  and  Father  of  Jesus  Christ,  taking  up 
into  Himself  the  attributes  with  which  the  visible 
Universe  is  clothed,  reveals  Himself  to  the  redeemed 
man  as  one  who  puts  His  entire  being  and  power  and 
plan  in  pledge,  to  the  end  that  man  may  grow  to  full 
stature.  It  is  not  the  lines  of  Pope,  but  the  lines  of 
Sidney  Lanier  that  express  the  truth. 


THE  SPRINGHEAD  OF  WONDER 

"  As  the  marsh-hen  secretly  builds  on  the  watery  sod, 
Behold,  I  will  build  me  a  nest  on  the  greatness  of  God." 

The  Christian's  individuality  grows  upon  the  divine 
being,  is  not  absorbed  by  it.  His  relation  to  God  is 
not  a  vague,  though  ecstatic,  relation  to  the  Absolute, 
but  a  personal  relation  to  an  infinite,  holy,  and  creative 
will  which  is  at  work  within  his  nature,  building  him 
up  in  the  divine  likeness.  His  will  to  be  his  fullest 
self  gains  edge  and  temper  from  growing  intimacy  with 
the  divine  perfection.  He  refuses  the  tempting  pathos 
of  the  view  which  regards  him  as  "a  bit  of  morning 
cloud  in  the  infinite  azure  of  the  past."  The  pith  and 
marrow  of  him  is  a  strong  and  masterful  will.  He 
flinches  from  nothing  that  life  can  yield  of  terror  and 
toil  and  pain.  But  through  his  friendship  with  the 
Eternal  he  joins  sweetness  to  strength.  His  kinship 
to  God  is  his  title-deed  to  a  radiant  and  heroic  man- 
hood, into  which  no  touch  of  pathos  can  enter,  and 
which  at  the  same  time  kindles  in  him  a  cleansing  fire 
of  shame  and  longing,  a  fire  that  searches  his  nature 
and  purpose  through  and  through.  While  he  lives,  he 
lives  mightily.    And  when  he  dies,  he   crosses  the 

[7] 


THE  ATONING  IJFE 

great  divide  with  a  serene  and  steadfast  hope  of  closer 
intimacy  with  God. 

So  his  knowledge  of  God  and  his  knowledge  of  self 
become  inseparable.  Together  they  widen.  Together 
they  are  clarified.  Self-knowledge  is  the  key  to  all. 
Through  it  he  wins  entrance  into  the  being  and  purpose 
of  the  Eternal.  He  does  not,  then,  do  honor  to  the  true 
God  by  sacrificing  clarity  of  self-knowledge  to  the  joys 
of  mystic  communion.  To  lose  himself  were  to  lose 
the  true  God.  Through  the  sanctity  and  clarity  of 
self-knowledge  his  knowledge  of  God  becomes  pene- 
trating. God's  Word  becomes  a  two-edged  sword, 
cleaving  through  all  illusion  and  half-truths.  His  awe 
of  God  and  his  love  of  God  become  a  single  and  in- 
divisible emotion. 

The  contemplation  of  the  divine  attributes  opens  to 
him  a  profound  enjoyment  of  self.  The  divine  omni- 
presence means  that  all  things  in  their  several  beings 
and  values  are  real  to  God.  The  contemplation  of  the 
divine  omnipresence  puts  the  spur  upon  his  powers  and 
faculties.  It  is  enough  for  him  that  he  is  being  made 
in  God's  image.    Little  by  little  he  masters  his  van- 

[8] 


THE  SPRINGHEAD  OF  WONDER 

ity  and  his  fear,  and  climbs  to  the  clear  and  untroubled 
vision  of  things  as  they  are. 

The  contemplation  of  the  divine  omnipotence  does 
not  discourage  and  paralyze  him ;  it  rather  gives  him 
heart  and  hope.  It  is  true  that  he  is  the  creature  of 
an  hour.  His  strength  counts  for  as  little  as  the  sand  on 
the  seashore,  the  bit  of  floating  cloud  in  the  sky.  It  is 
true  that  he  has  nothing  of  his  own.  All  he  has  belongs 
to  God.  But  herein  lies  his  greatness.  He  works  out 
his  own  salvation  with  fear  and  trembling  because  it 
is  God  that  works  in  him  to  will  and  to  do  of  His  own 
good  pleasure.  This  is  commonly  called  the  paradox 
of  the  spiritual  life.  But  the  word  is  wholly  out  of 
place.  There  is  no  paradox.  The  Apostle  Paul 
describes  two  sides  of  a  single  experience.  When  the 
soul  feels  and  knows  the  true  God,  all  is  God's  and 
everything  is  one's  own.  Salvation  is  one's  own 
achievement,  because  salvation  is  God's  achievement 
wrought  out  within  the  working  and  struggling  will  of 
man.  The  contemplation  of  the  divine  omnipotence 
fills  the  Christian  with  fear  and  trembling.  But  it 
is  the  fear  and  trembling  of  one  who  for  the  first  time 

[9] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

stands  in  the  presence  of  a  supremely  beautiful  object, 
like  the  Yellowstone.  His  heart  throbs.  His  being 
expands.  The  omnipotence  of  God  has  become  man's 
title-deed  to  measureless  and  illimitable  growth. 

His  knowledge  of  things,  when  he  views  the  universe 
as  it  is  in  itself,  tempts  him  to  suicide.  He  knows 
just  enough  to  make  his  ignorance  terrifying.  His 
knowledge  is  like  a  candle  burning  in  a  little  clearing 
within  the  forest  primeval.  Every  stir  of  wind  threatens 
it  with  extinction.  Its  flickering  is  incessant.  Rarely 
does  it  burn  clear.  And  the  feeble  circle  of  light  sur- 
rounding it  makes  visible  the  immeasurable  darkness 
concealing  powers  which  he  cannot  measure  and  can- 
not name.  But  let  him  gain  personal  knowledge  of 
God,  and  then  his  ignorance  becomes  his  inspiration. 
God  is  the  teacher  and  he  the  pupil. 

"  What  delights  can  equal  those 
That  stir  the  spirit's  inmost  deeps. 
When  one  that  loves  and  knows  not,  reaps 
From  one  who  loves  and  knows." 

It  is  true  that  the  more  penetrating  his  knowledge 
of  life  becomes,  the  deeper  is  his  consciousness  of  igno- 

[10] 


THE  SPRINGHEAD  OF  WONDER 

ranee.  It  is  true  that  the  clearer  is  his  analysis  of 
knowledge,  the  wider  stand  the  gates  through  which 
things  unknown  assail  him.  But  he  loves  to  have  it 
so.  He  knows  nothing.  But  God  knows  all.  And 
the  pains  of  ignorance  that  pierce  him  through  and 
through,  what  are  they  but  the  price  he  pays  for  the 
privilege  of  kinship  to  the  Omniscient  ?  His  ignorance 
and  his  knowledge  blend  into  a  single  mental  action. 
And  through  it  the  majesty  and  the  splendor  of  the 
mind  of  God  dawn  upon  him  with  a  beauty  that  is  as 
intimate  as  it  is  compelling. 

If  the  Christian  were  asked  to  give  his  impression  of 
God  in  a  single  phrase,  he  would  say,  God's  restraint. 
He  knows,  to  his  shame  he  knows,  that  his  own  growth 
in  knowledge  and  power  is  not  attended  by  an  equiva- 
lent growth  in  restraint.  His  knowledge,  if  it  comes  to 
be  large  and  imposing,  imperils  the  mental  freedom  of 
other  men.  If  he  has  much  to  impart  and  has  the  gift 
of  expression  in  large  measure,  he  is  fairly  sure  to  talk 
other  people  down.  He  dominates  the  minds  of  others, 
does  not  create  individuality  in  them.  And  as  to  his 
power,  his  inbred  tendency  is  to  assert  it  to  its  limit. 

[11] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

That  is  the  instinctive  tendency  of  all  human  power. 
Thus  the  man  in  the  automobile,  with  a  wonderful 
instrument  obedient  to  his  hand,  uses  the  power  of  his 
machine  to  the  utmost,  forgetting  the  rights  of  other 
people.  The  same  thing  holds  true  of  political  power. 
The  tendency  to  despotism  is  ingrained.  The  object 
of  all  constitutional  government  is  to  furnish  power 
with  checks  and  balances,  imposing  upon  it  limits 
which  it  dare  not  pass  over.  The  most  serious  struggle 
of  civilization  is  to  keep  the  law  from  becoming,  in 
Solon's  terrible  phrase,  like  the  net  which  holds  the 
little  fish,  while  the  big  fish  break  through.  This 
inbred  tendency  of  human  power  masters  us  even  in 
the  holiest  places.  The  head  of  the  family  becomes 
a  despot  from  whose  loving  tyranny  there  is  no  escape. 
The  teacher  turns  his  sceptre  into  a  rod  or  a  spear. 
The  friend  destroys  the  bloom  and  fragrance  of  friend- 
ship by  overbearing  the  one  he  loves. 

God,  as  the  Christian  knows  Him,  has  a  restraint  as 
strong  as  His  omnipotence.  His  power  is  infinite. 
His  knowledge  illimitable.  If  a  man  were  God,  then 
woe  to  his   fellow-men.     His   very  goodness    would 

[12] 


THE  SPRINGHEAD  OF  WONDER 

become  their  bane.  He  would  establish  a  tyranny 
swallowing  the  individuality  of  men,  in  order  to  keep 
them  from  sin.  But  how  wonderful  is  our  God.  His 
attributes  of  omnipresence,  omnipotence,  and  omni- 
science do  not  imperil  man's  right  to  be  his  fullest  self. 
They  safeguard  and  insure  that  right.  And  while 
the  friend  of  God  admires  Him  for  many  things,  this 
is  the  summit  of  his  admiration.  God's  restraint  is  as 
deep  as  His  being  and  His  power. 

Here,  then,  is  the  springhead  of  wonder.  To  the 
man  who  has  found  himself  in  Christ,  the  old  things 
have  passed  away.  All  things  become  new.  The  fol- 
lower of  Jesus,  the  friend  of  God,  when  life  presses 
him  hard,  drinks  from  the  brook  that  flows  by  the  road 
and  lifts  up  his  head  with  unconquerable  hope. 


[18] 


CHAPTER    n 

THE    PROVING-GROUND    OF    REALITT 

WHEN  the  Christian  finds  himself  in  God,  he 
is  not  alone.  He  finds  his  Neighbor  close 
beside  him.  God,  as  He  is  known  in 
Christ  and  in  His  Word,  is  not  the  Absolute,  the 
unrelated  Infinite,  prisoner  of  His  own  infinitude, 
but  the  All-related  One.  God's  deepest  diflFerenee 
from  us  lies  in  His  capacity  for  relationships,  in- 
finite in  number  and  each  one  of  them  going  as  deep 
as  His  nature.  The  relationships  into  which  God 
enters  are  not  relationships  which  He  can  put  on  or 
put  off  at  will.  They  are  part  and  parcel  of  His  own 
eternal  nature  and  purpose.  When  the  follower  of 
Jesus  knows  himself  in  God,  he  knows  a  being  who  has 
no  spiritual  meaning  or  value  apart  from  his  Neighbor. 
The  mystic  would  fain  see  God  as  He  is  in  Himself. 
To  obtain  the  beatific  vision,  he  will  even  turn  monk. 

[14] 


THE  PROVING-GROITND  OF  REALITY 

K  need  be,  he  will  sacrifice  his  relationships  with  other 
men,  assessing  them  as  matters  of  secondary  reality. 
The  relationship  of  his  soul  to  God  he  takes  to  be 
the  primary  reality.  To  reach  that  reality  he  subjects 
himself  to  a  splendid  discipline,  a  superb  self-denial. 
One  by  one  he  puts  away  the  social  bonds  that  hold 
him  fast  within  the  mutual  obligations  that  constitute 
the  common  life.  He  seeks  to  become  a  pure  spiritual 
essence,  the  soul,  in  order  that  he  may  reach  the  saving 
contemplation  of  the  pure  divine  reality.  But  the  God 
of  the  mystic  is  not  the  God  and  Father  of  Jesus  Christ. 
The  true  God,  whose  method  of  self-revelation  is  re- 
corded and  attested  in  the  Scriptures,  discloses  His 
inmost  secrets  only  to  people  living  in  families  and 
constituting  the  nation. 

The  mystic  does  not  reach  the  full-grown  Christian 
conception  of  divine  and  human  reality.  In  order  to 
enjoy  the  ecstasy  of  union  with  God,  he  throws  his 
individuality  into  the  divine  abyss.  But  in  the 
Christian  view  of  the  universe,  individuality  is  the 
whole  stake  and  issue.  How  to  conceive  of  God 
so   that  the   nearer   man   comes    to   God,  the  more 

[15] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

does  he  abound  in  the  human  sense,  the  more 
individual  does  he  become  —  that  is  the  issue  between 
the  Christian  view  of  reality  and  other  religious  views. 
The  divine  abyss  is  found  only  in  the  heart  of  man. 
The  deeper  the  Christian's  life  with  God,  the  more 
deeply  does  he  enter  into  the  common  lot,  and  the  more 
seriously  does  he  take  his  relationships  with  his  fellows. 
The  final  law  of  life  is  given  in  the  words  of  Jesus : 
"  Thou  shalt  love  the  Lord  thy  God  with  all  thy  heart, 
and  with  all  thy  soul,  and  with  all  thy  mind.  This  is 
the  first  and  great  commandment.  And  the  second  is 
like  unto  it.  Thou  shalt  love  thy  neighbor  as  thyself. 
On  these  two  commandments  hang  all  the  law  and  the 
prophets.**  The  Christian's  God,  the  Christian's  self, 
the  Christian's  Neighbor,  —  here  are  the  three  com- 
ponent elements  of  ultimate  reality.  They  may  not  be 
disentangled.  Not  one  of  the  three  can  be  fully  known 
or  appreciated  without  the  others.  If  the  Christian 
takes  his  own  soul  to  be  a  more  solid  reality  than  his 
relation  to  his  neighbor,  if  he  thinks  away  his  social 
obligations  in  order  to  reach  divine  reality,  he  loses  all. 
His  Neighbor  and  he  are  coordinate  realities.     Only 

[16J 


THE  PROVING-GROUND  OF  REALITY 

in  their  common  substance  and  value  can  the  trae 
God  be  known  as  He  knows  Himself. 

Here,  then,  is  the  proving-ground  of  reality.  And 
not  only  the  proving-ground  of  reality  for  human  be- 
ings putting  themselves  to  hard  labor  for  their  nation 
and  their  race,  but  the  proving-ground  of  the  reality 
that  is  real  for  God.  God  can  be  known  only  in  the 
degree  and  measure  of  His  self-revelation.  He  clearly 
reveals  Himself  nowhere  save  in  the  deep  of  human 
fellowship.  The  Christian  view  is  perfectly  expressed 
in  the  First  Epistle  of  St.  John.  God  is  light  and 
in  Him  is  no  darkness  at  all.  There  is  nothing  in  God 
that  holds  itself  aloof,  refuses  to  enter  into  relationship 
with  men.  In  the  inmost  recess  of  ultimate  reality 
there  is  concealed  nothing  that  will  oppose  itself  to 
man's  longing  for  personal  and  social  perfection.  And 
man,  once  redeemed,  cannot  think  of  himself  save  in 
the  midst  of  his  fellows.  Human  fellowship  and  part- 
nership and  commerce,  based  upon  and  issuing  from 
man's  fellowship  with  God,  —  that  is  the  pith  and 
marrow  of  saving  truth. 

Revelation  and  fellowship  are,  therefore,  as  insepa- 
0  [17] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

rable  as  the  concave  and  convex  sides  of  a  circle. 
Neither  of  them  is  possible,  in  high  degree,  without  the 
other.  The  perfecting  of  one  involves  the  completion 
of  the  other.  If  we  say  that  we  love  God  and  love  not 
our  Neighbor,  we  lie  and  do  not  speak  the  truth.  If  I 
seek,  in  mystic  vision,  to  see  God  face  to  face  and, 
soaring  from  some  mountain-top  of  contemplation, 
take  wing  into  the  Infinite  Being,  I  deceive  myself, 
and  sooner  or  later  bring  upon  myself  a  fall  into  hideous 
unrealities.  My  Neighbor  is  as  real  to  me  as  I  am  to 
myself.  His  being  and  my  being,  interknitting,  give 
to  God  the  only  medium  of  revelation  commensurate 
with  His  nature.  To  those  who  are  greatly  individual 
and  whose  individuality  stands  deep  in  social  obligation, 
He  speaks  a  gladdening  and  saving  message.  Between 
Him  and  them  passes  a  living  Word  that  gives  unity 
and  meaning  to  our  existence,  sweetness  and  strength 
to  our  joy  in  life. 

My  Neighbor's  will  and  mine,  interlocking,  give  to 
God  the  one  means  whereby  His  holy  will  and  saving 
plan  can  grip  history  and  hold  it  fast,  guiding  and 

directing  it  towards  its  final  goal.    The  end  of  history 

[18] 


THE  PROVING-GROUND  OF  REALITY 

is  the  imposing  of  moral  form  on  the  raw  material  of 
human  life.  All  culture  aims  to  make  raw  material 
submit  itself  to  form.  A  noble  woman's  voice,  through 
years  of  tireless  training,  blends  art  with  nature  into  an 
indivisible  force  that  lifts  us  out  of  ourselves.  A  great 
poet  blends  sound  and  rhythm  and  sense  and  imagi- 
nation into  poetry  of  the  grand  style,  and  the  world  is 
enriched.  The  sculptor  weds  his  idea  to  marble  and 
to  bronze,  and  there  comes  to  light  a  form  of  manly 
dignity  or  womanly  beauty  that  invites  us  to  eternize 
ourselves.  In  the  measure  that  we  transmute  existence 
into  life  by  means  of  culture,  we  impose  form  on  raw 
material. 

But  moral  form  and  culture  is  of  all  forms  the  high- 
est and  most  diflBcult.  How  shall  we  moralize  human 
nature  so  that  every  human  being  shall  be,  and  be 
valued  as  a  thing  of  infinite  worth  ?  Lust  and  passion 
and  ambition  surge  through  us  like  a  tide.  At  our 
best,  we  are  not  so  far  away  from  the  brute  that  we  dare 
boast  about  our  gains.  And  at  our  worst  we  are  far 
below  the  brutes.     Our  reason  makes  us  capable  of 

falling  into  depths  of  cruelty  and  vileness  which  it  were 

[19] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

an  outrage  on  justice  to  call  bestial.  The  beasts  have 
never  tortured  the  conquered  as  have  the  Assyrians  and 
the  Iroquois.  The  beasts  never  used  the  thumbscrew 
and  the  rack  and  the  stake  in  honor  of  the  powers  higher 
than  themselves.  And  the  beasts  have  never  made 
lust  the  conscious  end  of  existence.  When  man  is  at 
his  worst,  he  is  immeasurably  worse  than  the  beasts. 

The  monk  in  us  bids  us  give  up  the  attempt  to  moral- 
ize the  vast  mass  of  human  lust  and  cruelty  and  inert- 
ness. Let  us  go  apart  with  those  of  like  mind  and  seek 
moral  and  spiritual  perfection.  So  alone  may  we  hope 
to  achieve  sainthood.  But  the  genius  of  Christianity, 
when  we  take  it  rightly  and  largely,  forbids  this  step. 
We  will  stand  fast  in  our  place.  We  will  be  in  the  world 
but  not  of  the  world.  With  the  help  of  the  Great 
Companion,  we  will  impose  moral  form  upon  this 
vast  mass  of  human  nature  and  motive.  My  Neigh- 
bor and  I  will  knit  our  wills  into  a  conmaon  will  and 
cast  our  hopes  in  the  mould  of  a  common  hope,  so  that, 
through  our  corporate  hope  and  purpose,  God  may 
give  moral  culture  and  value  to  the  life  of  man. 

The  proving-ground  of  reality  is  also  the  proving- 
[20] 


THE  PROVING-GROUND   OF  REALITY 

ground  of  knowledge.  So  far  as  the  Christian's  ex- 
perience is  concerned,  the  searching  questions  regarding 
the  nature  of  knowledge  and  the  source  of  certainty 
are  unanswerable  on  purely  philosophic  grounds.  His 
knowledge  of  God,  the  ultimate  reality,  carries  him 
just  far  enough  to  know  that  he  is  known.  The  pro- 
cess of  his  knowing  goes  just  deep  enough  to  discover 
that  God^s  revelation  underpins  his  reasoning.  And 
the  logic  of  Christian  experience  shuts  him  up  within 
the  bounds  of  fellowship,  as  the  only  place  where  God 
clearly  reveals  Himself.  There  alone  can  a  saving 
word  regarding  human  life  and  motive  be  spoken. 
There  or  nowhere  is  the  proving-ground  of  knowledge. 
Where  shall  the  ultimate  reality  be  found?  And 
when  I  have  found  it,  how  shall  I  know  that  I  know  it  ? 
Only  when  I  have  gone  deep  into  my  relationships 
with  my  fellows  of  every  degree  and  kind,  when  I  have 
learned  to  take  my  Neighbor's  wishes  and  longings  and 
choices  as  equally  real  with  my  own.  Then,  having 
grown  out  of  the  crude  and  narrow  self  into  the  true 
and  abiding  self,  I  shall  have  acquired  in  some  degree 
that  high  art  of  putting  and  pressing  final  questions, 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

which  is  the  pith  of  wisdom.  There  are  certain  ques- 
tions, searching  and  cleansing,  about  the  meaning  and 
value  of  life.  To  the  follower  of  Jesus,  possessed  of  His 
secret,  there  is  but  one  place  where  such  questions  can 
be  sanely  and  hopefully  asked.  When  my  Neighbor's 
being  and  my  being  interknit,  and  when  his  will  and 
mine  interlock  to  create  and  maintain  a  living  corporate 
being  and  purpose,  then,  within  that  living  corporate 
consciousness  and  longing,  Revelation  wells  up,  the 
living  God  speaks  home  to  our  hearts  and  brings  our 
restless  reason  to  rest. 

How  shall  I  know  that  I  know  the  innermost  nature 
and  meaning  of  things  ?  How  shall  I  become  possessed 
of  a  knowledge  from  which  reality  does  not  shrink 
away,  leaving  it  brain-sick  and  heart-sick?  Reason 
alone  cannot  bring  it  to  me.  Reason  and  will  must 
join  and  interfuse  in  an  act  of  saving  faith.  I  must 
find  myself  within  a  supreme  plan  and  purpose  re- 
garding history,  concerning  human  nature  as  a  whole. 
This  means  that  my  views  of  things,  if  they  are  to 
acquire  and  maintain  moralizing  power,  must  work 
up  into  a  creative  attitude  towards  life.     It  is  at  this 

[22] 


THE  PROVING-GROUND  OF  REALITY 

point  that  the  Christian  begins  to  understand  the  ground 
and  worth  of  his  belief  in  creation.  Science  can  say 
nothing  to  him  regarding  the  creation  of  the  world. 
And  when  Science  ventures  to  speak  about  it,  she 
forgets  herself  and  transcends  her  function.  Even 
pure  Philosophy  labors  in  vain  to  attain  it.  The 
belief  in  the  creation  of  the  world  is  an  organic  part 
of  a  larger  whole ;  it  is  part  and  parcel  of  the  creative 
attitude  towards  life  taken  in  its  entirety.  Only  by 
believing  in  the  creative  power  of  God  can  we,  when 
once  we  have  seen  human  life  in  its  full  scope,  live 
the  creative  life  in  the  midst  of  our  fellows.  God  re- 
veals Himself  to  us  as  a  power  and  purpose  high  and 
lifted  up  and  holy.  The  man  who  is  redeemed  from 
his  narrow  and  vulgar  self,  resting  upon  the  creative 
will  and  being  of  the  Great  Commander,  takes  and 
steadily  maintains  a  creative  attitude  towards  society, 
towards  his  nation  and  his  race.  The  belief  in  the 
creative  life  of  God  and  man,  while  science  and  philos- 
ophy fall  silent,  forces  itself  on  the  heart  of  the  people 
whom  Christ  hath  redeemed,  as  a  necessary,  an  inevi- 
table act  of  faith. 

[23] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

A  cheap  and  self-indulgent  pessimism  will  say  to 
the  creative  will  in  us,  "  Life  is  a  poor  player 

"  *That  struts  and  frets  his  hour  upon  the  stage 
And  then  is  heard  no  more :  it  is  a  tale 
Told  by  an  idiot,  full  of  sound  and  fury, 
Signifying  nothing.' 

"  '  We  are  such  stuff 
As  dreams  are  made  on,  and  our  little  life 
Is  rounded  with  a  sleep.' " 

But  the  Christian  has  found  the  sacramental  meet- 
ing-place where  God  cheers  and  strengthens  His  sons 
and  daughters.  The  gladness  of  the  creative  life 
is  theirs.  It  is  given  to  few  to  be  creative  in  the  field 
of  literature  and  art.  But  in  that  matter  which  is  the 
main  concern  of  us  all,  the  great  business  of  being 
human,  it  is  within  the  reach  of  all. 

Having  met  God  and  been  saved  by  God  working 
through  Christ,  our  deepest  desire  is  to  know  our 
fellows  and  to  know  God  in  them.  We  pass  through 
two  periods  of  longing  after  knowledge.  At  first  we 
long  to  know  things.     As  we  walk  through  the  stack 

[24] 


THE  PROVING-GROUND  OF  REALITY 

of  a  great  library,  every  book  becomes  a  challenge. 
And  when,  that  challenge  ringing  in  our  ears,  we  go 
forth  to  measure  our  knowledge  with  the  universe, 
our  own  minds  become  a  purgatory,  so  keen  and  pierc- 
ing is  the  pain  of  our  ignorance.  But  by  and  by, 
through  closer  fellowship  with  our  race  and  a  widen- 
ing comprehension  of  our  task,  another  longing  comes 
upon  us  like  a  strong  man  armed.  The  great  library 
still  stirs  and  challenges  and  inspires  us.  But  far  more 
deeply  are  we  stirred  by  a  crowd  or  even  a  mob  of  our 
fellows.  To  make  our  neighbors  real  to  ourselves  and 
to  shape  our  life  to  our  knowledge,  this  becomes  our 
passion.  We  know  so  few.  And  those  few  we  know 
so  poorly.  Perhaps,  shrinking  from  soiling  contact 
with  the  mob,  we  draw  apart,  and  end  by  making 
our  books  our  luxury.  But  not  so  does  the  Christian 
know  Christ.  From  the  library  he  goes  to  the  city 
slum,  where  humanity  becomes  an  open  sore.  There 
he  finds  his  greatest  task  and  his  highest  privilege. 
He  longs  to  know  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men  and  to 
know  them  well.  And  if  ever  he  envies  God  His  omni- 
science, it  is  when  he  realizes  the  narrowness  of  his  own 

[26] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

sympathies  and  the  resulting  impoverishment  that  robs 
his  goodness  of  its  penetrative  and  redeeming  power. 

God's  saving  Word  to  man  comes  to  men  only  when 
they  have  taken  on  themselves  a  complete  personal  and 
social  obligation.  It  is  revealed  through  the  corporate 
will  of  redeemed  spirits.  It  is  published  in  terms  of 
human  fellowship.  And  it  comes  at  our  hearts  as  the 
Winged  Victory  in  the  Louvre  comes  at  the  lover  of 
beauty  mounting  the  stairs.  Nothing  in  him  can  with- 
stand the  conviction  which  it  brings.  With  the  Word 
of  God  as  a  two-edged  sword,  he  goes  forth  into  the 
world  conquering  and  to  conquer. 


[26] 


CHAPTER   in 

DrVTNE  AND   HUMAN   FREEDOM 

IN  Christian  experience  God  and  man  are  de- 
fined together.  The  innermost  nature  of  man 
is  individuality,  his  ability  to  know  and  to  mas- 
ter himself.  The  innermost  nature  of  God  is  that 
union  of  power  and  restraint  which  makes  intimacy 
with  God  the  stronghold  of  man's  right  to  himself. 
God  and  man  are  personal  beings. 

Personality,  being  our  ultimate  fact,  cannot  be 
defined.  But  we  can  describe  it  so  far  as  our  expe- 
rience has  disclosed  it  to  us.  The  description  may  be 
put  under  three  heads.  In  the  first  place,  personality 
consists  of  clear  self-knowledge.  As  we  grow  out  of 
childhood,  we  grow  into  the  knowledge  of  ourselves. 
Here  is  found  both  the  glory  and  the  tragedy  of  mature 
life.    The  tragedy,   because,   when   once  we  clearly 

[27] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

know  ourselves,  there  is  no  escape  from  piercing  pain. 
What  we  have  done  and  what  we  have  left  undone, 
brought  into  the  light  of  an  ideal  that  exalts  itself  high 
above  our  achievements,  becomes  a  torture  to  the 
conscience.  But  self-knowledge  is  also  the  glory  of 
life,  because  our  little  candle  of  self-knowledge  throws 
its  beam  into  the  nature  and  will  of  God,  upon  whose 
mind  our  thinking  rests.  It  is  true  that  our  knowledge 
of  ourselves  is  at  best  imperfect,  a  promise  rather  than 
an  achievement.  But  God  knows  Himself  perfectly. 
In  Him  is  no  darkness  at  all.  And  into  His  relation- 
ship with  us  He  puts  His  whole  being.  His  entire  pur- 
pose, so  that  our  beginnings  of  self-knowledge  are 
transfigured.  Slight  as  it  is,  it  is  enough,  since  through 
it  God  reveals  Himself  to  us  and  through  us  to  our 
fellows.  The  child  learns  the  alphabet,  and  it  turns 
out  to  be  the  open  door  into  the  republic  of  letters, 
wherein,  by  and  by,  he  earns  the  suffrage.  Even  so 
we  learn  the  alphabet  of  self-knowledge,  and  lo!  we 
enter  into  communion  with  God  and  man.  Therefore 
we  have  the  courage  and  patience  to  toil  mightily  that 
we  may  make  advances  in  the  art  and  wisdom  of  know- 

[28] 


DIVINE  AND  HUMAN  FREEDOM 

ing  ourselves,  because  deepening  knowledge  of  self 
brings  to  light  the  saving  knowledge  of  God.  Our 
self-knowledge,  built  upon  God's  perfect  and  entire 
knowledge  of  Himself,  makes  us  persons. 

The  second  aspect  of  personality  which  experience 
gives  us  is  self-mastery.,  As  we  grow  out  of  childhood, 
the  ideal  of  life  comes  to  be  an  increasing  self-control. 
To  guide  ourselves,  to  make  decisive  choices,  to  plan 
wisely,  and  to  work  out  the  logic  of  our  choice  into  a 
ripening  purpose  —  this  is  our  aim.  It  is  true,  again, 
that  our  self-mastery  is  an  imperfect  and  struggling 
thing.  If  we  take  it  to  be  a  great  or  considerable  thing, 
we  deceive  ourselves.  If  we  know  ourselves  with  some 
measure  of  clearness,  then  we  know  that  our  victories 
over  self  have  been  gained  at  a  great  price.  There's 
not  one  of  them  that  did  not  cost  sweat  and  blood. 
Again  and  again  the  issue  and  upshot  of  the  battle 
with  ourselves  hung  in  the  balance.  And  no  sooner 
is  a  victory  hardly  won,  than  fresh  conflicts  open  before 
us.  Every  success  becomes  an  opportunity  for  larger 
action.     Up  out  of  our  nature  and  out  of  the  general 

human  nature  of  which  we  form  a  part,  new  elements 

[29] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

of  experience  are  constantly  rising.  To  work  them 
into  our  plan  and  purpose  involves  increasing  conflict 
and  strain.  As  we  look  back  we  tremble  when  we  see 
how  near  we  came,  a  hundred  times,  to  failure.  And 
the  failures !  The  closets  of  our  memory  are  filled 
with  ghosts.  Our  ideal  involves  not  only  self-mastery 
in  external  things,  but  complete  self-control  in  interior 
things,  the  perfect  keeping  of  the  heart  out  of  which 
come  the  issues  of  life.  In  the  light  of  that  ideal,  one's 
achievements  fall  miserably  short. 

But  our  struggling  and  straining  will  takes  us  far 
enough  to  make  the  discovery  that  an  eternal  will  is 
at  work  within  our  will.  Then  we  go  a  little  way 
with  our  discovery  and  find  the  truth  to  be  that  our 
will  is  within  that  other  will,  the  will  of  God.  Our 
plan  and  purpose  realize  their  meaning  as  part  of  an 
eternal  purpose  which  subjects  them  to  a  fiery  criti- 
cism, but  which  criticises  in  order  to  save.  God's 
mind  discloses  itself  in  our  hearts  as  holy  and  complete 
in  its  self-masterhood.  His  will  reveals  itself  through 
our  struggles    after   goodness   and    masterhood.     By 

our  kinship  and  relation  to  Him,  the  promise  of  self- 

[30] 


DIVINE  AND  HUMAN  FREEDOM 

mastery,  in  the  face  of  all  our  shortcomings,  becomes 
more  trustworthy  day  by  day. 

The  third  aspect  of  personality  is  the  capacity  for 
self-communication,  the  art  of  expression.  In  all 
high  things,  in  art  and  letters  and  song,  we  live  by 
expression.  But  the  kind  of  expression  with  which 
personality  deals  is  of  all  kinds  the  most  difficult.  We 
seek  to  express  ourselves  in  terms  of  our  relationship 
with  our  neighbors.  The  raw  material  the  artist 
handles  is  obstinate  enough,  rebels  against  his  pur- 
pose, refuses  to  take  form  from  his  mind  and  hand. 
The  raw  material  of  morality  is  vastly  more  recalci- 
trant. Human  nature  in  ourselves  and  in  our  race 
resists  the  ideal  in  a  thousand  ways.  Yet  the  ideal 
of  personality  involves  a  perfect  expression  of  self  in 
terms  of  our  kinship  to  all  men.  The  test  of  truth, 
in  the  long  run,  lies  in  its  ability  to  put  the  language 
of  common  people  to  noble  uses.  Silence  is  golden 
only  when  a  man  has  great  things  on  his  mind.  And 
even  then  it  is  not  golden,  unless  it  is  the  preparation 
for  deep  and  simple  utterance.  '  Goodness  is  nothing 
better  than  a  veneer  upon  evil,  if  it  does  not  cast  itself 

[SI] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

in  the  mould  of  the  common  lot  and  the  common 
welfare.  A  great  person  is  a  being  greatly  individual, 
yet  having  a  gift  for  communion  with  his  fellows  equal 
to  his  individuality.  That  is  the  ideal.  Unless  we 
bend  all  our  powers  to  its  service,  we  are  false  to  the 
Christian  conception  of  self-knowledge  and  self-mas- 
tery. For  in  the  measure  that  we  know  and  master 
ourselves,  the  glory  of  life  comes  to  be  the  revelation 
of  the  living  God  in  our  hearts.  His  word,  unless  it 
goes  forth  from  our  hearts  winged  with  power  to  reach 
all  mankind,  falls  dead.  The  spring  of  divine  revela- 
tion runs  dry.  The  deepest  reality  and  truth  cannot 
be  brought  to  light  except  through  our  commerce  and 
conversation  with  our  neighbors. 

We  cannot  be  persons  if  we  take  an  elective  course 
in  human  association.  If  we  group  ourselves  with  our 
own  sort,  with  those  closely  resembling  us  in  culture 
and  manner  and  social  standing,  we  cease  to  be  true 
individuals. 

Nothing  short  of  mankind  in  the  mass  is  the  mate- 
rial with  which  we  must  deal.     Therefore  personality 

implies  and  involves  a  creative  attitude  towards  human 

[32] 


DIVINE  AND  HUMAN   FREEDOM 

life  taken  in  its  entire  scope.  This  means  that  in  so 
far  as  we  are  real  Christians,  we  live  and  breathe 
in  the  hope  of  moralizing  and  redeeming  our  Race. 
But  this  hope,  in  its  turn,  involves  a  vast  margin  be- 
tween things  as  they  are  and  things  as  we  mean  to 
make  them.  We  find  such  a  margin  in  our  own  natures. 
We  could  not  live  for  a  day  on  terms  of  intimacy  with 
ourselves  if  the  friendship  of  God  had  not  made  real 
to  us  that  ideal  self,  that  true  soul  of  ours  which  is 
superior  to  all  our  failures  and  littleness  and  sins. 
There  is  an  immeasurable  margin  between  what  we 
are  and  what  we  are  bound  to  become.  And  through 
the  grace  of  God  we  look  at  that  margin  with  the  same 
confidence  with  which  the  American  farmer  looks  at 
the  untilled  prairie.  Every  acre  of  it  calls  for  the 
plough.  Even  so,  in  our  hearts  the  boundless  margin 
between  our  present  state  and  our  future  perfection 
calls  to  the  ploughshare  of  divine  and  human  strength. 
We  claim  the  margin  as  our  own  in  fee.  And  in  that 
claim  stands  our  freedom  in  dealing  with  our  own 
nature. 
So,  too,  we  see  a  vast  margin  between  society  as  it 
D  [33] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

is  and  society  as  we  mean  to  make  it.  Society  as  it  is ! 
Were  it  not  for  our  faith  in  God  we  should  not  dare 
to  look  at  it  with  eyes  clear  and  undimmed.  We 
should  try  to  play  once  more  the  child's  game  of  make- 
believe.  We  should  try  to  hypnotize  ourselves  into 
a  fool's  paradise.  But  the  Christian  who  has  in  some 
degree  attained  to  self-knowledge  and  who  faces  his 
ovn  stubborn,  sinful  nature  with  radiant  confidence 
and  joyous  freedom,  can  find  in  society  no  foes  to  God 
and  man  that  can  make  him  flinch.  The  splendid 
margin  between  things  as  they  are  and  things  as  they 
shall  be,  through  faith  in  the  living  God  who  builds 
his  throne  in  the  hearts  of  men,  becomes  his  own  in 
fee.     In  his  claim  to  it  stands  his  freedom. 

My  Neighbor  and  I,  each  finding  himself  in  God, 
each  finds  the  other  close  beside  him.  Each  takes 
the  infinite  worth  of  the  other  as  a  starting-point  of 
thought.  Neither  of  us  is  able,  without  the  other's 
help,  to  see  the  truth  as  it  is  in  Jesus.  Welded  by 
common  hope  and  need  into  a  conunon  purpose,  we 
look  around  us  on  the  earth  to  take  stock  of  our  pos- 
sessions, our  privileges,  and  our  tasks. 

[84] 


DIVINE  AND  HUMAN  FREEDOM 

But  if  we  would  see  straight  and  think  straight,  we 
must  be  careful  to  clear  our  heads  before  we  take 
account  of  stock.  There  is  a  certain  distinction,  the 
distinction  between  Church  and  State,  which  has 
played  a  great  part  in  the  past  and  has  a  part  to  play 
in  the  future.  But  it  is  no  help  to  clear  thinking  on 
the  ultimate  question  regarding  the  meaning  and  value 
of  human  life  as  a  whole.  It  has  immense  value  if 
used  and  applied  as  a  subordinate  truth.  But,  if 
taken  as  primary,  it  becomes  a  prolific  mother  of  half- 
truths.  We  must  view  human  life  in  its  unity  and 
totality.  We  have  seen  what  monotheism,  as  a  work- 
ing conviction,  comes  to.  What  the  scientific  convic- 
tion regarding  the  unity  of  Nature  does  for  reason, 
the  vital  belief  in  the  unity  of  God  does  for  the  con- 
science. Nothing  better  can  be  said  about  the  unity 
of  Nature  than  John  Stuart  Mill  said.  To  believe 
in  the  unity  of  Nature  is  to  feel  assured  that  there  is 
nothing  in  the  whole  reach  of  the  universe  that  can 
bring  one's  mind  to  permanent  intellectual  confusion. 
The  Christian  could  ask  for  no  finer  expression  of 

vital  monotheism.     It   is  an   impassioned   conviction 

[35] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

that  there  is  nothing  in  the  universe  that  can  bring 
human  conscience  to  permanent  moral  confusion. 
Our  own  being,  individual  and  social,  is  full  of  things 
that  give  the  lie  to  conscience.  The  forces  of  nature 
and  history  are  apparently  leagued  together,  again 
and  again,  to  veto  man's  brave  plan  for  moralizing 
all  men  and  moralizing  them  completely.  But  we  be- 
lieve in  the  unity  of  God.  The  Divine  Unity,  reveal- 
ing and  authenticating  itself  in  our  hearts,  becomes 
the  foundation  on  which  an  indestructible  conviction 
regarding  the  unity  of  humanity  is  built.  On  this 
rock  Christ  builds  His  Church.  The  gates  of  Hell, 
the  united  forces  of  inertia  and  brutality,  fashion  and 
sin,  shall  not  prevail  against  her.  Because  we  are 
Christians,  we  have  an  unconquerable  faith  in  man. 
Out  of  our  faith  springs  a  mighty  confidence  in  human 
freedom.  And  the  belief  in  freedom  enables  us  to 
look  upon  history  as  a  moral  process. 

Freedom,  as  a  political  conception,  began  its  career 
in  Greece.  In  contrast  with  the  Oriental  monarchy 
and  in  contrast  with  the  tyrannies  which  grew  up  on 
Greek  soil,  the  ideal  of  freedom  involved  the  existence 

[36] 


DIVINE  AND  HUMAN  FREEDOM 

of  a  commonwealth  whose  members  claimed  equal 
rights  and  asserted  equal  obligations.  Mutual  rights 
and  obligations,  that  is  the  essence  of  political  freedom. 
In  the  absolute  monarchy  there  was  one  law  for  the 
monarch,  another  for  his  subjects.  Obligation  was 
not  equal  to  right.  But  in  the  free  commonwealth 
right  and  obligation  are  of  equal  strength.  No  one 
is  above  the  law.     No  one  is  below  it. 

The  Christian,  inheriting  the  ideal  of  freedom  from 
the  Greek,  cannot  develop  it  to  its  full  extent  unless 
he  weds  to  it  the  belief  in  the  unity  and  perfectibility 
of  mankind.  He  cannot  be  content,  as  was  the  Greek, 
to  build  a  commonwealth  of  freemen  upon  a  base  of 
servile  population.  No  matter  what  his  own  indi- 
vidual prerogatives  may  be,  they  turn  into  a  Nessus 
shirt  and  torture  him,  if  he  cannot  hold  fast  to  his 
conviction  that  his  prerogatives  are  a  leverage  for 
the  uplifting  of  the  disfranchised.  And  the  ultimate 
ground  of  his  belief  in  human  freedom  is  the  revelation 
of  the  living  God  in  his  heart. 

Human  freedom  rests  on  divine  freedom.  The  inner- 
most reality  is  a  Holy  Being  and  Will.    The  work- 

[37] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

shop  of  that  Holy  Will  is  not  some  distant  Heaven, 
but  the  heart  of  man.  The  history  of  our  mother 
earth  fascinates  us.  We  delight  to  guess  at  her  de- 
scent from  some  nebula.  And  if  we  are  happy  enough 
to  have  reconciled  our  science  and  our  faith,  the  crea- 
tive power  of  God  manifested  in  the  universe  confirms 
our  knowledge  of  His  creative  power  in  our  lives. 
But  the  stars  are  not  our  final  witnesses  to  the  being 
and  will  of  God.  His  master-work  is  the  personality 
of  man.  It  is  in  the  creation  of  individuality  that  we 
see  Him  at  His  best.  The  God  of  the  Christian  is 
the  maker  of  men.  He  makes  them  individual.  He 
makes  them  free. 

How  our  freedom  can  be  reconciled  in  thought  with 
the  omnipotence  of  God,  religious  metaphysic  has  never 
been  able  to  explain.  It  seems  to  be  necessary,  if 
we  are  to  have  a  rounded  philosophy  of  religion, 
to  sacrifice  a  part  of  our  religious  experience.  But 
so  long  as  we  are  content  to  live  in  Christ,  making 
our  metaphysic  the  servant  of  our  experience,  we  can- 
not be  brought  to  a  stand  by  metaphysical  diflSculties. 
We  know  what  we  know.     And  what  we  know  is  that 

[38] 


DIVINE  AND  HUMAN  FREEDOM 

God's  will  takes  our  will  up  into  itself  without  de- 
stroying it.  We  know  that  the  nearer  our  approach  to 
Him  and  the  clearer  our  vision  of  His  being  and  beauty, 
the  deeper  goes  the  root  of  individuality  in  us,  the  closer 
becomes  our  grip  on  ourselves,  the  more  do  we  abound 
in  our  own  sense.  In  the  full  round  of  Christian  expe- 
rience man's  freedom  is  found  to  be  God's  holiest  gift. 
Herein  is  the  ultimate  fact  and  the  final  mystery  of  life. 
Every  fact  that  is  large  enough  to  be  permanently 
interesting  opens  into  mystery.  A  given  fact  purchases 
immunity  from  mystery  by  making  itself  too  small 
to  command  an  enduring  attention.  Therefore  it 
does  not  surprise  us  that  individuality  becomes  the 
supreme  mystery.  It  is  the  supreme  mystery  because 
it  is  the  supreme  fact.  We  have  gone  a  little  way  in 
the  acquirement  of  self-knowledge  and  self-master- 
hood.  But  that  little  is  enough  to  make  life  luminous 
and  radiant.  We  have  seen  our  God  at  His  work. 
He  is  creating  us  in  His  image  and  likeness.  He  is 
creating  us  to  be  persons,  creative  individuals.  The 
fact  of  our  life  in  God  and  the  mystery  of  it  are  in- 
separable. 

[89] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

When  we  have  actually  seen  God  at  His  work  of 
making  men,  we  can  find  no  words  to  express  our 
admiration  of  His  restraint.  But  His  restraint  and 
His  freedom  are  two  aspects  of  one  thing.  As  our 
experience  deepens,  we  discover  this  to  be  a  funda- 
mental law  for  our  guidance.  Restraint  and  freedom 
are  inseparable.  Restraint  must  be  as  deep  as  free- 
dom, else  one  man's  freedom  becomes  another  man's 
tyranny.  As  we  grow  in  grace  and  in  the  knowledge 
of  our  Lord  and  Saviour  Jesus  Christ,  it  comes  to  be 
a  haunting  fear  lest  our  self-assertion  may  make  it 
more  difficult  for  others  to  be  their  best  selves.  We 
dread  lest,  in  the  enjoyment  of  our  own  powers,  we 
may  break  down  or  weaken  the  individuality  of  others. 

The  truth  about  God  and  the  truth  about  man  are 
one  and  indivisible.  Restraint  is  the  inner  aspect  of 
freedom.  Freedom  is  the  outer  aspect  of  restraint. 
Masterful  self-assertion,  in  which  respect  for  the  rights 
of  others  is  as  deep  as  respect  for  one's  self,  that  is 
the  ideal  of  life.  When  that  ideal  rises  clear  before 
our  eyes,  we  see  God  as  Isaiah  saw  Him,  high  and 
lifted  up.    His  glory  fills  the  temple  of  reality.    Our 

[40] 


DIVINE  AND  HUMAN  FREEDOM 

hearts  glow  with  admiration  of  Him.  Strengthened 
and  gladdened  by  His  presence,  we  face  our  world. 
We  feel  bitter  shame  for  every  privilege  that  is  not  a 
leverage  for  the  common  betterment.  Our  increments 
of  culture  and  knowledge  and  happiness,  —  we  put 
them  all  in  pledge  for  the  uplifting  of  the  downmost 
man.  We  devote  ourselves  to  the  inseparable  ideals 
of  freedom  and  law. 


II  «1 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE   SOVEREIGN  WELL  CALLED   FAITH 

THE  followers  of  Jesus,  when  once  they  deeply 
know  themselves,  are  people  of  one  idea. 
Their  views  of  life  are  summed  up  in  a  single 
conception,  the  Kingdom  of  God.  If  we  would  be 
true  to  the  mind  and  logic  of  our  Scriptures,  we  must 
take  great  pains  at  this  point.  For  confusion  of  thought 
is  easy,  apparently  necessary.  But  if  we  let  the  centre 
of  our  thinking  shift  from  the  Kingdom  of  God  to 
some  other  conception,  the  distinguishing  quality  of 
our  Religion  is  obscured. 

In  the  first  place,  we  must  repeat  it,  the  subject  of 
our  thought  is  the  life  of  man  in  its  entirety  and  unity. 
We  cannot  permit  the  Christian  belief  in  personal 
immortality  to  throw  the  Christian  scheme  of  truth 
out  of  bearing.  Small  wonder  is  it  that  personal  im- 
mortality frequently  fills  our  minds,  to  the  exclusion 

[4«] 


THE  SOVEREIGN   WILL   CALLED   FAITH 

of  every  other  thought  except  the  thought  of  God. 
There  are  times  when  the  strains  and  sorrows  and 
losses  of  life  make  it  almost  inevitable.  Besides,  the 
educational  value  of  the  belief  is  beyond  all  estimate. 
It  brings  home  to  us  the  supreme  reality  of  unseen 
things.  It  frees  us  from  the  strangle  hold  of  the  visible 
world.  It  detaches  us  from  material  and  immediate 
ends,  trains  us  to  longmindedness,  and  develops  in 
us  the  capacity  to  make  the  present  the  loyal  servitor 
of  a  distant  future.  But  in  another  way  the  belief 
can  be  so  applied  that  it  results  in  a  serious  injury  to 
the  frame  of  Christian  truth.  The  immortality  of  the 
individual  can  be  and  often  is  separated,  mentally  and 
emotionally,  from  the  larger  view  of  which  it  forms  a 
constituent  part. 

The  Bible  gives  us  the  right  perspective  and  propor- 
tion. It  is  the  word  of  God  to  us,  because  it  authen- 
ticates the  logic  of  the  divine  revelation  in  us.  Now 
the  logic  of  the  Scriptures  does  not  start  with  the  im- 
mortality of  the  individual  as  its  premise.  On  the 
contrary,  the  starting-point  is  the  unity  and  perfecti- 
bility of    the   nation.     From    this   starting-point  the 

[43] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

mind  of  Scripture  moves  on  to  the  goal  of  the  redeemed 
reason,  the  Kingdom  of  God.  This  fundamental  con- 
ception takes  up  into  itself,  as  an  absolutely  neces- 
sary instrument  and  medium,  the  immortality  of  the 
individual.  But  it  is  the  Kingdom  of  God,  not  the 
immortality  of  the  soul,  that  gives  to  the  Christian 
his  controlling  and  dominating  point  of  view. 

In  the  second  place,  we  must  clear  our  heads  of  the 
distinction  between  the  visible  and  the  invisible  worlds. 
The  educational  value  of  the  distinction  is  very  great. 
It  is  a  necessary  part  of  our  kindergarten  training. 
But  when  we  cease  to  think  as  children,  when  we  put 
away  childish  thoughts  of  things  eternal,  this  distinc- 
tion falls  to  the  ground.  For  when  once  the  Saviour 
has  gained  entire  control  over  our  minds,  when  the 
cross  has  crucified  our  vanity  and  allayed  our  fear, 
when  the  unity  of  God  has  taken  full  possession  of 
our  mind,  we  know  and  feel  the  unity  of  life.  Heaven 
is  not  another  world.  It  is  the  over-world  and  the 
inner-world,  the  encompassing  and  interior  reality 
of  things.  "What  we  call  this  world  is  an  enclosure 
from  that  wide  field  of  reality.     If  we  let  it  out  to  our 

[44] 


THE  SOVEREIGN  WILL  CALLED  FAITH 

senses  and  they  alone  cultivate  it,  then  it  fences  itself 
off  from  the  reality  that  surrounds  it.  The  enclosure 
becomes  a  prison.  And  when  the  soul  takes  up  arms 
against  the  senses,  the  reality  of  the  other  world  is 
exalted  in  order  to  beat  down  the  reality  of  this  world. 
But  the  man  redeemed  has  a  single  world.  He  views 
all  things  in  their  relation  to  the  Kingdom  of  God. 
Nature  and  History,  the  indivisible  body  of  reality, 
are  being  guided  by  God  toward  a  moral  end  and  issue. 
He  takes  part  in  that  plan  and  process,  and  so  eter- 
nizes himself. 

It  is  an  old  saying  that  Socrates  brought  down  phi- 
losophy out  of  the  clouds.  He  made  it  a  part  of  life. 
Philosophy,  as  he  practised  it,  has  the  right  of  way  in 
the  street  and  on  the  curbstone  as  truly  as  the  pedler 
and  the  broker.  Even  so  Jesus  brought  the  Kingdom 
of  God  out  of  the  clouds.  By  His  life  He  gave  it  the 
right  of  way  on  earth.  When  He  began  His  ministry, 
he  found  the  field  preempted  and  occupied  by  three 
tendencies.  First,  there  was  the  Jewish  monk,  the 
Essene.  Like  the  monk  of  all  times  and  all  places, 
he  preserved  his  ideals  by  taking  them  apart  from  the 

[45] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

world.  He  attained  the  saving  vision  of  unity  and 
meaning  in  things  by  thinking  away  the  substance 
and  meaning  of  history.  He  took  to  himself  the  wings 
of  the  mystic  and  soared  above  the  earth.  Second, 
there  was  the  Puritanizing  Jew,  the  Pharisee.  When 
times  grew  hard,  when  the  heathen  World  Power 
laid  a  heavy  and  masterful  hand  on  the  conscience 
of  Israel,  and  when  God's  delay  in  righting  wrong 
seemed  to  be  unbearable,  the  Pharisee  sought  to  ease 
his  heart  and  lessen  the  strain  on  his  will  by  writing 
an  Apocalypse.  In  it  he  not  only  called  down  the  anger 
and  terror  of  God  upon  the  Heathen;  he  imagined 
them  as  poured  out  before  his  eyes.  Thirdly,  there 
was  the  way  of  the  Galilean  farmer  and  fisherman, 
the  fellow-peasantry  of  Jesus.  Looking  for  a  path 
through  those  contradictions  of  terrestrial  politics 
which  vetoed  the  ideals  of  Israel,  he  could  find  no  road 
except  in  an  appeal  to  the  sword.  To  trust  in  God 
and  fight  it  out,  —  there  was  no  other  way. 

Our  Lord  turned  His  back  on  all  three  methods. 
His  mysticism  preferred  hands  and  feet  to  wings.  It 
m^de  Heaven  the  over-world  and  the   inner-world  of 

[46] 


THE  SOVEREIGN  WILL  CALLED   FAITH 

the  soul.  By  majestic  moral  genius  He  made  His 
vision  a  part  of  sound  and  saving  action.  Like  His 
fellow-peasants  He  took  Israel's  claim  to  a  world- 
monarchy  seriously.  He  could  not  endure  the  con- 
tradictions and  gainsayals  of  world-politics  and  world- 
trade.  He  insisted  that  the  hope  of  His  nation  was 
the  sovereign  and  dominant  reality.  But  He  would 
not  appeal  to  force.  He  sheathed  the  sword,  once 
and  forever.  His  method  was  the  cross.  His  sinless- 
ness  made  Him  capable  of  perfect  sympathy.  The 
egotist,  in  proportion  to  his  egotism,  strips  his  neigh- 
bor's feelings  and  desires  and  plans  of  their  reality, 
of  their  right  to  count  and  weigh  in  his  final  estimate 
of  things.  But  to  our  Lord  the  things  that  were  real 
to  His  neighbor  were  real  to  Him.  His  neighbor's 
desires.  His  neighbor's  plans,  were  a  primary  part  of 
His  world.  Nor  did  He,  in  thinking  of  His  neighbor, 
take  pains  to  pick  and  choose  people  who  would  be 
like-minded  with  Himself.  On  the  contrary.  His 
world  of  neighborliness  included  the  people  who  were 
farthest  away  from  Him  in  social  sympathy,  and  who 
were  most  abhorrent  to  Jewish  orthodoxy  and  nation- 

[47] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

alism.  The  Samaritan  outside  the  Jewish  pale,  the 
outcasts  and  the  disinherited  within  it,  these  were  His 
neighbors. 

His  method  was  the  perfection  of  sympathy.  He 
did  not  shield  Himself  against  the  brutality,  the  hos- 
tility, and  the  indifference  of  His  world  by  hardening 
Himself.  He  exposed  His  breast,  without  shield  or 
breastplate,  to  the  world's  strokes.  He  accepted 
the  cross  as  the  rule  of  life.  Stripped  of  religious 
technicality,  this  means  that,  by  perfect  s3Tnpathy 
and  perfect  spiritual  imagination.  He  rendered  all 
His  neighbors,  of  every  kind  and  degree,  real  to  Him- 
self. He  made  the  Kingdom  of  God  inevitable.  His 
master-word,  the  text  of  all  His  preaching,  was  "the 
Kingdom  of  God  is  at  hand."  Now,  if  we  would 
conceive  and  define  the  Kingdom  of  God  in  everyday, 
language,  it  is  nothing  but  the  consummation  of  neigh- 
borliness.  We  sometimes  say  that  in  the  city  we  live 
so  close  to  one  another  that  we  have  no  neighbors, 
while  in  the  country  we  live  far  enough  apart  to  be 
neighborly.  The  congestion  and  competition  of  life 
dehumanize  us.     Our  sympathies  do  not  grow  with 

[48J 


THE  SOVEREIGN  WILL  CALLED  FAITH 

the  years.  That  highest  form  of  imagination,  which 
consists  in  realizing  the  individuality  and  rights  of  all 
our^neighbors,  —  we  do  not  cultivate  it,  and  so,  by 
and  by,  being  underfed,  it  withers  up.  The  vast  mass 
of  people  are  not  real  to  us.  But  the  Kingdom  of  God 
as  our  Lord  conceived  it  is  neighborliness.  He  realized 
the  ideal.  He  made  the  Kingdom  of  God  inevitable. 
He  could  say  without  ceasing,  the  Kingdom  of  God  is 
at  hand. 

In  the  field  of  religion  there  is  no  kinship  so  interest- 
ing as  that  between  Jesus  and  Buddha,  and  no  con- 
trast so  striking.  In  both  the  masterhood  that  re- 
veals itself  through  gentleness  is  the  dominant  trait. 
The  mysticism  of  them  both  is  that  sweet  and  urgent 
mysticism  in  which  the  only  reality  is  the  reality  of 
the  inner  life.  Buddha  took  the  interior  truth  of 
Hindoo  thought,  wherein  severe  and  tireless  thinking 
had  succeeded  in  disproving  the  reality  of  everything 
save  the  mind,  and  universalized  and  popularized  it. 
He  wiped  out  the  distinction  of  castes.  He  demon- 
strated the  moral  and  spiritual  dignity  of  all  men. 

For  this  great  victory,  however,  he  paid  a  terrible 
B  [49] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

price,  in  that  he  stripped  the  political  life,  the  historical 
career  of  man,  of  its  primary  meaning  and  value.  Our 
Lord,  on  the  contrary,  like  the  Pharisee  and  the  Peas- 
ant Revolutionist,  took  the  unity  and  the  hope  of  His 
nation  as  the  staple  of  His  thought.  Through  the 
cross  He  cleansed  it  of  its  violence,  purified  and  per- 
fected it.  But  He  did  not  sacrifice  the  superb  tough- 
ness of  its  moral  fibre,  nor  did  He  throw  away  its 
magnificent  grip  and  hold  on  history.  He  realized 
the  nation's  hope  in  terms  of  universal  feUowship. 
He  made  the  love  of  God  and  the  love  of  man  in- 
separable. He  revealed  the  unity  and  fatherhood  of 
God  as  the  base  and  ground  of  unity  in  human  ex- 
perience. 

To  the  question.  What  is  the  distinguishing  quality 
and  mark  of  Christianity  amongst  the  world's  reli- 
gions ?  there  is  but  one  answer.  It  makes  belief  in 
the  Kingdom  of  God  inevitable.  The  Bible  is  the 
Book  of  Witness  to  the  aim  and  method  of  divine 
revelation.  The  Christ  is  the  heart  and  spring  of  the 
Bible.  The  Christ  and  His  Book  together  make  it 
possible  for  men  and  women  who  know  their  world 

[60] 


THE  SOVEREIGN  WILL  CALLED  FAITH 

to  act  upon  the  conviction  that  history,  the  life  of 
man  in  its  unity  and  entirety,  may  be  moralized. 

The  followers  of  Jesus  do  not  deceive  themselves 
regarding  the  state  of  their  own  hearts.  No  people 
have  as  deep  and  keen  a  sense  of  sin  as  they.  Having 
become  intimate  with  divine  and  human  perfection, 
the  abyss  of  selfishness  in  their  natures,  were  it  not  for 
the  irresistible  grace  of  God,  would  fill  them  with 
despair.  Nor  do  they  deceive  themselves  regarding 
society  and  regarding  their  race  and  nation.  As 
they  walk  by  the  City  Prison,  they  hear  its  awful  de- 
fiance to  Christ.  Knowing  the  slum,  they  know  to 
the  full  the  fearful  fight  that  lies  ahead.  They  know 
the  horror  of  war  wherein  so-called  Christian  nations 
glorify  force  and  even  gild  it  with  apparent  religion. 
They  know  the  pitilessness  of  power  which  crushes  the 
weak  in  order  to  increase  the  strength  of  the  strong. 
They  know  the  lust  which  makes  the  world  of  men  a 
hideous  place  for  an  innocent  girl  to  walk  in.  They 
shut  their  eyes  to  nothing.  And  yet  they  believe  in 
the  reign  of  love  and  righteousness  and  right.  God 
helping  them,  they  can  believe  in  nothing  else. 

[51] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

Jesus,  accepted  as  the  Saviour  from  sin,  as  the  Inter- 
preter of  life,  forces  His  followers  to  put  to  themselves 
the  decisive  question  —  Do  you  believe,  truly  and 
with  your  whole  heart,  in  the  reign  of  God  on  earth  ? 
They  may  temporarily  obscure  that  question.  For  a 
while  the  Christian  may  accept  a  monasticized  Chris- 
tianity as  the  equivalent  for  the  Christianity  of  Christ. 
The  inunortality  of  the  soul,  detached  from  a  con- 
nection with  a  larger  conception  and  conviction,  may 
monopolize  consciousness.  But,  sooner  or  later,  Christ 
and  His  Word  bring  Christianity  back  to  its  bearings. 
Then  His  question  comes  home  —  Do  you  believe 
in  the  Kingdom  of  God  ?  Is  it  more  than  a  bare  con- 
ception which,  from  time  to  time,  visits  your  brain  ? 
Is  it  a  passion  possessing  your  heart  ?  Is  it  a  mighty 
conviction  gripping  and  guiding  your  will?  If  it  is 
not  all  that,  it  is  at  best  a  halting,  a  crippled  Chris- 
tianity. 

What,  then,  is  faith  ?  It  is  the  radiant  answer  to 
that  decisive  question  proposed  to  the  conscience  of 
man  by  God  in  Christ.    The  ecclesiastical  usage  of  the 

word  "faith "has  sorely  obscured  its  true  perspective. 

[62] 


THE  SOVEREIGN  WILL  CALLED  FAITH 

The  credal  conception  of  belief,  which  should  always 
put  this  larger  conception  of  faith  in  the  light,  has  often 
darkened  it.  The  Infallible  Church  has  substituted 
belief  in  herself  for  belief  in  the  Kingdom  of  God,  and 
thus  has  side-tracked  the  final  question.  The  vision 
of  Heaven  has  sometimes  distracted  the  Christian's 
attention  from  the  moral  end  of  history.  Thinking 
about  Jesus  does  not  necessarily  mean  thinking  with 
Jesus.  Indeed,  one  can  do  a  great  deal  of  the  former 
kind  of  thinking  while  doing  very  little  of  the  latter. 
But  when  we  think  with  Jesus,  when  we  permit  Him 
to  redeem  our  reason,  there  is  just  one  track  for  thought 
to  follow.  We  start  where  He  started.  We  take  the 
Old  Testament  as  the  book  of  the  nation.  With  our 
nation  we  grow  up  into  a  sovereign  hope.  We  look 
for  the  reign  of  God  on  earth,  for  right  triumphant 
over  wrong,  for  justice  victorious  over  brute  force, 
for  the  predominance  of  mercy  and  truth.  Our  eyes 
strain  to  see  the  dawn  of  the  world's  peace.  We  come 
to  Christ  with  our  great  hope.  Day  by  day  our  heart 
sickens,  as  we  know  our  own  sin  and  the  world's  in- 
difference.   We  come  to  Christ  to  be  saved. 

[5S] 


THE  ATONmG  LIFE 

His  work  and  mind  and  person  bring  us,  through 
the  sacramental  power  of  a  perfect  humanity,  into  the 
saving  presence  of  the  Deity.  Through  Him  God's 
full  being  and  reality  invade  history  and  appeal  to  the 
conscience.  The  Christian  is  beset  by  snobberies 
innumerable,  by  tyrannies  immeasurable,  by  servility 
unspeakable.  The  forces  that  conspire  to  make  true 
fellowship  impossible  throng  about  him.  But  the 
Captain  of  Salvation  makes  him  strong.  By  the  power 
of  His  life,  Jesus  brings  the  Kingdom  of  God  down 
out  of  the  clouds.  He  dedicates  man  to  the  supreme 
hope.  So  when  He  puts  the  final  question  to  the  con- 
science —  Do  you  believe  in  the  reign  of  God  on  earth  ? 
the  Christian  answers,  Yes,  with  all  my  heart.  Christ 
makes  that  question  inevitable.  He  also  makes  an 
affirmative  answer  to  it  necessary.  And  so  He  be- 
comes our  Saviour,  delivering  us  from  the  vanities 
that  debase  us  and  the  fears  that  unman  us. 

Christ  and  His  Word  are  a  Word  from  God  that 
penetrates  to  the  depths  of  our  being,  and  so  perfects 
religion.  For  the  function  of  religion  is  to  give  man 
ease  of  heart  concerning  his  connection  with  the  unseen 

[54] 


THE  SOVEREIGN  WILL  CALLED  FAITH 

world  and  the  future  lying  before  him.  Christianity 
fulfils  all  religion  by  giving  us  a  radiant  confidence 
regarding  the  moral  quality  and  end  of  history.  Put 
in  another  way,  this  means  that  our  religion  gives  us 
a  saving  certainty  regarding  the  possibility  of  perfect 
fellowship.  Saving  certainty  is  of  many  kinds.  There 
is  the  saving  certainty  of  the  wrestler  when,  after  a 
terrific  strain,  his  breath  comes  to  him  again  and  he 
faces  his  adversary  with  a  clear  eye  and  steady  nerves. 
There  is  the  saving  certainty  of  the  statesman  when 
some  great  corporate  action,  brought  to  a  stand  for 
a  while  by  hostile  forces,  rallies  the  energies  of  the  best 
elements  of  the  commonwealth,  and  embodies  itself 
in  Law.  And  there  is  the  supreme  form  of  certitude, 
the  saving  certainty  of  the  Christian  when,  fully  aware 
of  the  deadly  power  of  sin  and  worldliness,  he  feels 
the  being  and  will  of  the  living  God  well  up  within 
his  soul.  He  feels  and  knows  that  perfect  human  fellow- 
ship is  possible.  •  The  realities  of  friendship  and  the 
family,  the  soundest  and  sweetest  elements  of  life, 
find  here  their  goal  and  consummation. 

The  reach  and  scope  of  action  is  in  proportion  to 
[65] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

the  strength  and  depth  of  certainty.  There  is  a  Hamlet 
in  us  all.  The  ideal  in  us,  confronting  a  mass  of  human 
nature  and  motive  too  vast  to  be  moralized,  loses  hope. 
Our  supreme  enterprise  loses  the  name  of  action. 
But  God  through  Christ  gives  us  heart  and  hope.  Out 
of  our  saving  certainty  a  supreme  action  springs;  an 
action  into  which  the  man  of  faith  puts  his  whole 
nature,  head  and  heart,  reason  and  emotion ;  an  action 
through  which  man,  by  divine  grace  and  power,  creates 
himself,  and  by  one  supreme  deed  constantly  renewed 
foreordains  the  course  of  his  after  life,  so  that  all  his 
actions  take  from  this  action  both  form  and  color. 

Faith  in  the  Kingdom  of  God,  in  human  fellowship, 
is  the  sovereign  power  of  will.  The  saving  purpose 
of  the  followers  of  Jesus  grips  the  world  with  a  hold 
that  cannot  be  shaken  oflf.  Mountains  stand  in  the 
way.  But  in  the  Christian  consciousness  is  found  a 
moral  force  that  can  remove  them. 


[66] 


CHAPTER   V 

LAW  THE  FINAL  PROBLEM  OF  LIFE 

CHRISTIANITY  is  the  final  form  of  mono- 
theism. Its  essence  is  a  unitary  view  of 
nature  and  destiny,  rendered  convincing  by 
a  Supreme  Person,  the  Christ.  The  meaning  of 
personality  is  here  seen  in  its  highest  form.  For 
it  is  the  part  of  personality  to  unify  experience,  to 
bring  the  seen  and  the  unseen  fields  of  reality  into 
intimate  relation  with  one  another.  When  the  world 
seems  to  have  played  us  false,  when  the  fair  humanities 
of  our  early  experience  have  fallen  a  prey  to  doubt 
and  disillusionment,  it  is  the  loving  and  holy  life  of  a 
prophet  or  a  friend  that  gives  us  back  our  trust  in  the 
frame  and  constitution  of  things,  our  belief  that  life 
is  liv£lble.  Personality,  in  one  form  or  another,  is  the 
source  and  spring  of  all  our  sacraments.  And  the 
significance  of  a  sacrament  is  found  in  the  fact  that  the 

[57] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

innermost  forces  and  meanings  of  the  universe  take 
to  themselves  the  things  of  sense  as  a  visual  language, 
the  medium  of  revelation,  and  through  that  medium 
speak  home  to  us,  forcing  upon  us  the  conviction  that 
the  world  is  one,  and  that  what  is  dearest  to  our  hearts 
is  deepest  and  most  enduring  in  the  Universe.  The 
rose  in  bloom  makes  time  the  child  of  eternity.  The 
smile  and  hand-clasp  of  a  friend  deliver  life  from  its 
fractions  and  make  it  whole. 

The  Person  of  Christ  is  the  source  and  spring  of 
the  Christian's  sacraments.  Through  His  mind  and 
work  the  unity  of  God  pierces  to  the  centre  of  our 
consciousness,  so  that  our  experience  is  unified, 
becoming  a  consistent  and  purposive  whole.  Thus 
we  are  saved  from  dualism,  from  the  belief  that  splits 
the  universe  in  two.  It  does  not  take  any  very  wide 
knowledge  of  religious  history  to  prove  that  dualism, 
sometimes  in  a  severe  and  sometimes  in  a  mild  form, 
is  the  normal  faith  of  mankind.  The  depth  of  its  root, 
the  strength  of  its  appeal,  are  clearly  seen  in  the  part 
it  has  played  in  the  history  of  our  Christianity  itself. 
But  the  consistent  Christian  view  is  a  thoroughgoing 

[68] 


LAW  THE  FINAL  PROBLEM  OF  LIFE 

monotheism.  The  Divine  Unity,  embodied  in  Christ, 
visualized  by  Christ,  revealed  by  Christ, —  that  is  the 
marrow  of  our  creed.  Our  faith  is  not  a  mere  intel- 
lectual monotheism.  If  it  were  that,  it  might  be  pos- 
sible to  confine  it  to  our  heads.  It  might  be  nothing 
better  than  a  noble  abstraction,  a  splendid  ghost  having 
power  enough  to  give  bad  dreams  to  worldly  people, 
yet  not  able  to  bring  the  creative  and  invigorating 
unity  of  God  to  bear  upon  the  entire  mass  of  human 
life  and  motive.  But  Christian  monotheism  does  just 
that  thing.  The  Person  of  Christ,  rooted  deep  in 
history  and  triumphantly  claiming  the  right  of  way 
in  the  field  of  morality,  does  for  conscience  what  the 
noble  portrait  of  some  individual  belonging  to  a  past 
age  does  for  our  culture.  The  portrait  overcomes 
time  and  space,  and  makes  the  individual  who  died, 
say  three  hundred  years  ago,  a  living  contemporary. 
Even  so  the  Christ  overcomes  time  and  space  and  all 
the  disunifying  forces  of  the  world.  The  unity  of 
God  and  the  unity  of  life  become  for  those  who  love 
and  serve  Jesus  a  solid  conviction,  a  present  and 
potent  fact,  an  irresistible  moralizing  force. 

[59] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

Monotheism,  as  a  living  faith,  involves  a  high  degree 
of  mental  concentration.  Polytheism  dissipates  and 
scatters  human  attention.  But  Monotheism  con- 
centrates it.  Emerson  has  somewhere  said  that  con- 
centration is  the  source  of  all  the  virtues.  It  is  a 
great  saying.  Concentrated  attention  to  some  con- 
siderable end  is  the  only  possible  source  of  real  virtue 
as  distinguished  from  conventional  morality.  Now 
Monotheism  in  everyone  of  its  forms  is  a  superior  kind 
of  concentration.  The  perfect  Monotheism  is  the 
supreme  form  of  concentration.  The  object  upon 
which  attention  is  fixed  and  riveted  is  the  moral  mean- 
ing and  end  of  history,  visualized  as  the  Kingdom  of 
God  and  realized  with  increasing  and  contagious  power 
in  human  fellowship.  We  repeat,  then,  that  the  mar- 
row of  the  Christian's  view  of  things  is  a  conception  of 
the  divine  unity  which  makes  it  as  intimate  with  life 
as  the  power  of  gravity  is  intimate  with  our  mother 
earth. 

Once  more,  we  must  take  pains  to  clear  our  heads. 
The  history  of  western  civilization  has  given  us,  by 
means  of  the  distinction  between  Church  and  State, 

[60] 


LAW  THE  FINAL  PROBLEM  OF  LIFE 

a  classification  of  our  largest  moral  values  under  two 
distinct  and  practically  separate  heads,  Righteousness 
and  Justice.  When  the  Catholic  Church  established 
herself,  without  the  help  of  and  even  in  mortal  op- 
position to  the  heathen  state,  and  when  soon  after  she 
proceeded  to  monasticize  herself,  sending  her  picked 
men  and  women  apart  from  the  world  to  seek  perfec- 
tion through  the  ascetic  life,  the  word  "righteousness  " 
became  largely  identified  with  the  moral  perfection  of 
the  single  soul.  The  great  word  "  justice,"  necessarily 
identified  with  the  State,  was  severely  wounded.  Not 
mortally  wounded,  because  the  Christian  consciousness 
has  not  wandered  and  cannot  wander  so  far  from 
Christ  as  to  forget  its  responsibility  for  the  moral  con- 
duct of  the  world  at  large.  But  when  Christianity  was 
monasticized,  the  word  "  justice  "  was  deeply  wounded. 
The  historical  study  of  the  Scriptures  makes  it  certain, 
beyond  all  question,  that  where  we  have  two  terms  to 
cover  the  field  of  morality,  the  Word  of  God  has  but 
one.  If  we  would  fully  translate  the  Beatitude,  we 
must  say,  "Blessed  are  they  who  hunger  and  thirst 
after  righteousness   and   justice,   for  they   shall  be 

[61] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

filled.*'  If  we  would  think  with  Jesus  as  well  as  think 
about  Him,  if  we  would  take  our  logic  of  life  from  the 
Word  of  God,  we  must  steadily  conceive  our  religion 
as  aiming  at  the  moral  end  and  issue  of  history.  We 
are  people  of  one  Book,  and  that  Book  the  Bible. 
We  are  men  and  women  dominated  by  a  single  thought, 
and  that  thought  the  reign  of  Christ  on  earth.  Our 
master-virtue,  from  which  all  other  virtues  take  their 
tone  and  temper,  is  a  high  and  steady  and  sustained 
attention  to  the  Kingdom  of  God. 

This,  then,  is  the  way  in  which  we  do  our  thinking. 
We  stand  confronting  an  immense  need  and  task. 
It  is  nothing  less  than  the  creation  of  a  true  society 
and  fellowship.  We  are  forced  to  speak  of  it  as  our 
need,  because  in  no  other  way  can  we  hope  to  deeply 
know  God  and  ourselves,  because  in  no  other  way  can 
we  be  saved.  Revelation  and  need  are  inseparable. 
It  is  our  glorifying  wants  that  unlock  the  storehouse 
of  reality  and  truth.  The  secrets  of  life  are  not  dis- 
closed to  those  who  day-dream  and  drift.  The  depth 
of  revelation  is  porportioned  to  the  intensity  of  con- 
scious need,  and  the  will  and  purpose  which  spring 

[62] 


LAW  THE  FINAL  PROBLEM  OF  LIFE 

from  the  need.  Now  our  reading  of  the  Bible  is  on 
the  surface  until  we  realize  that  the  fundamental 
human  need  and  desire,  to  which  God  opens  His 
being  and  resources,  is  a  true  society.  But  a  fun- 
damental need  which  is  met  and  satisfied  by  divine 
revelation  necessarily  results  in  a  task.  The  depth 
of  the  need  and  the  greatness  of  the  revelation  are 
proportional.  Therefore,  as  Christians,  people  who 
take  Jesus  as  their  interpreter  and  guide,  an  immense 
task  confronts  us.  Our  Lord  has  put  us  under  bonds 
to  God  and  Man  to  create  the  true  society  and  fellow- 
ship. 

From  this  standing-ground  it  should  be  easy  to  see 
that  the  problem  of  Law  is  our  final  problem.  At 
any  rate,  whether  it  is  easy  or  hard,  see  it  we  must, 
and,  once  seen,  keep  it  steadily  before  our  mind's 
eye,  if  we  would  keep  our  thinking  straight  and  clear. 
There  are  some  elements  in  our  situation  that  may 
obscure  this  point.  In  Antiquity,  in  Israel,  and  no 
less  in  Greece  and  Rome,  it  was  easily  seen  and  con- 
stantly kept   in  view.     Indeed,  no  other  view  was 

possible.    Church  and  State  were  a  single  organism. 

[68] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

The  State  was  small.  The  danger  besetting  it  was 
close  at  hand.  Life  was  relatively  simple.  But  as 
for  ourselves,  we  live  under  widely  different  conditions. 
With  us  moderns,  Church  and  State  are  separate, 
sometimes  hostile  organisms.  The  modern  State  is 
an  immense  affair.  It  is  easy,  even  for  excellent 
people,  to  take  their  obligations  as  citizens  very  lightly. 
Within  the  vast  circle  of  the  nation's  being  many 
specialties  of  culture  are  pursued,  each  with  an 
absorbing  attention  and  devotion.  If  a  great  war, 
imperilling  the  existence  of  the  nation,  sounds  the 
call  to  arms,  all  folk  of  true  mettle  quickly  realize 
that  the  well-being  of  the  nation,  the  sanctity  of  its 
Law,  is  the  supreme  object  of  existence.  They  take 
Lowell's  words  as  their  own  and  say  — 

"What  were  our  lives  without  thee? 
What  all  our  lives  to  save  thee  ? 
We  reck  not  what  we  gave  thee ; 
We  will  not  dare  to  doubt  thee, 
But  ask  whatever  else,  and  we  will  dare  I  " 

But  in  the  times  of  peace,  crowded  with  diversified 
interests  of  body  and  mind  and  soul,  it  is  not  at  all 

[64] 


LAW  THE  FINAL  PROBLEM  OF  LIFE 

difficult  for  considerable  classes  of  good  people  to 
act  as  if  culture  or  science  or  art  were  the  main  end, 
whereas  all  such  things  are  parts  of  that  higher  life 
which  Law  alone  can  make  possible. 

Again,  the  Law  itself,  thanks  to  the  way  it  is  re- 
corded and  administered,  may  becloud  us  and  get 
in  between  us  and  the  main  point.  In  the  days  of 
Homer  and  the  Prophets,  the  Law  was  a  living  thing, 
having  its  seat  in  the  memories  of  living  men.  Natural 
and  a  matter  of  course  was  it,  therefore,  for  Heraclitus 
to  say  —  "  Fight  for  the  laws,  for  they  are  your 
city's  walls."  But  in  our  case  the  laws  are  recorded 
in  the  artificial  memory  of  books.  And  besides,  we 
have  a  large  body  of  dead  laws,  cumbering  the  statute- 
books,  but  incapable  of  being  enforced,  so  that  the 
multitude  of  laws  obscures  or  covers  over  the  majesty 
of  the  Law. 

Finally,  chief  amongst  the  facts  and  forces  which 
becloud  the  main  issue,  is  religion  itself.  Christians 
have  lived  for  nineteen  centuries  under  a  frame  of 
government  in  which  Church  and  State  are  distinct. 
It  has  become  almost  a  matter  of  course  to  view  the 
V  [65] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

Christian  religion  as  concerned  with  higher  interests 
than  those  of  the  State,  even  the  interests  of  the  soul. 
But  our  religion  is  so  far  from  being  superior  to  the 
question  of  Law  that  the  final  reason  for  its  superiority 
to  other  religions  is  found  in  the  fact  that  it  so  grounds 
the  conception  of  Law  that  the  highest  form  of  society 
becomes  possible.  Let  us,  then,  keep  our  minds  bent 
upon  our  task,  the  task  which  the  revelation  of  the 
living  God  sets  in  clear  light.  The  man  redeemed 
by  Christ  is  the  creator  of  good  society.  And  his 
final  problem  is  Law. 

Law  varies  according  to  the  matter  in  hand.  Hence 
result  shifting  conceptions  and  ambiguous  statements. 
But  beginning  with  the  laws  of  matter  we  have  an 
ascending  series.  The  law  that  binds  together  the 
members  of  a  holy  family  is  a  different  thing  from  the 
law  of  gravitation  that  draws  masses  of  matter  toward 
each  other.  The  law  of  love  and  friendship  that 
makes  one  will  out  of  two  wills,  rendering  each  in- 
dividual more  individual  by  reason  of  his  intimate 
union  with  the  other,  is  a  different  thing  from  the  law 

that  mixes  oxygen    and    hydrogen  to  make   water. 

[66] 


LAW  THE  FINAL  PROBLEM  OF  LIFE 

The  conception  of  law  must  adapt  itself  to  the  material 
it  handles.  But  the  final  statement  is  something  like 
this.  Law  is  a  corporate  will  composed  of  interlock- 
ing personal  wills.  Each  one  of  these  personal  wills  is 
bent  and  set  upon  creating  and  maintaining  good 
society.  Not  the  society  that  calls  itself  good,  which 
is  made  up  as  a  rule  of  our  most  pretentious  and  least 
useful  citizens,  but  the  society  that  loves  goodness 
and  seeks  the  common  good. 

The  Law  of  the  State,  viewed  in  its  existing  condi- 
tion, answers  very  poorly  to  that  conception.  If  the 
present  condition  of  things  were  the  whole  or  even  the 
chief  part  of  our  heritage,  as  honest  folk  we  would 
condemn  ourselves  to  bankruptcy.  We  would  make 
it  our  main  business  to  build  monasteries  and  nun- 
neries and  monastic  churches,  persuading  folk  less 
clear-sighted  than  we  to  support  them.  The  State 
as  we  see  it  is  far  removed  from  the  ideal.  We  can 
kill  a  man  because  he  has  killed  a  fellow-man.  But 
we  cannot  make  a  man  of  him.  We  shut  up  our 
criminals  in  States*  Prisons  and  thereby,  for  the  most 
part,  conduct  universities  of  crime.    The  City  Prison, 

[67] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

by  which  we  pass  sometimes  on  our  way  to  church, 
hurls  a  stubborn  and  ferocious  defiance  at  Law  and 
order  and  the  common  good.  We  do  not  have  to 
scratch  civilized  man  very  deeply  to  find  the  brute. 
Our  ethics  fall  a  prey  to  industrial  competition.  Our 
religion  constantly  blends  its  enthusiasms  with  the 
passion  of  war. 

But  the  State  at  its  worst  has  in  its  memory  the  great 
ideal  of  justice  shaped  long  ago  by  Roman  lawyers 
and  judges.  "Justice  is  the  steady  purpose  on  the 
part  of  the  State  to  see  to  it  that  every  man  has  all 
that  is  his."  The  State  at  its  best  administers  that 
ideal.  Grant  that  the  administration  is  rough  and 
approximate.  Still,  the  ground  gained  is  a  splendid 
strategic  position  from  which  we  may  advance  into 
the  future. 

And  then,  to  give  us  heart  and  hope,  there  are 
innumerable  places  in  what  we  call  the  private  life 
where  the  ideal  of  Law  is  fully  or  very  largely  realized. 
Friendships,  which  make  no  stir  but  which  fulfil  the 
law  of  life,  are  everywhere.  The  family  in  numberless 
cases  realizes  the  conception  of  Law  as  a  corporate  will 

[68] 


LAW  THE  FINAL  PROBLEM  OP  LIPE 

including  and  insuring  the  wills  of  all  its  members. 
Within  the  pale  of  friendship  and  the  family,  not  on 
the  field  of  battle  and  not  in  the  stress  of  competition, 
we  think  straight  regarding  the  meanings  and  values 
of  life.  In  these  places  the  true  Law  of  life  has  so 
far  made  for  itself  a  body  and  taken  form,  that  our 
higher  thinking  has  the  prestige  of  achievement  to 
spur  it  on.  In  these  tracts  of  deep  living  and  vital 
thinking  we  standardize  our  compass.  Here  the 
innermost  reality  of  things  comes  to  light.  Here 
Law  publishes  itself  with  an  authority  from  which 
there  is  no  appeal. 

The  Law  of  friendship  and  the  Law  of  the  family, 
the  ideal  of  justice  dimly  visioned  by  the  State — they 
all  stretch  out  their  hands  in  love  of  the  Kingdom  of 
God.  The  full  and  clear  logic  of  Law  is  fulfilled  in 
Christ.  Each  follower  of  Jesus,  like  his  Master, 
brings  the  Kingdom  of  God  down  out  of  the  clouds. 
By  realizing  the  ideals  of  neighborliness  and  fellowship, 
he  realizes  the  reign  of  God  on  earth. 

The  nature  of  Law  in  its  highest  sense  now  comes 
into  clear  light.    There  is  a  law  of  nature  which,  like 

[69] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

the  cannon-ball,  goes  straight  at  its  mark,  crushing 
what  it  reaches.  But  the  higher  Law  moves  in  a  dif- 
ferent way.  It  is  administered  by  every  true  teacher, 
who  makes  superior  knowledge  and  experience  the 
tireless  servitor  of  his  pupil's  mind.  It  is  administered 
by  every  true  father  and  mother,  who  devote  their 
whole  strength  to  clearing  and  guarding  a  space  where 
their  children  may  iBnd  and  be  themselves.  We 
know  how  grievous  is  the  tyranny  of  teaching.  And 
we  know  that  there  is  no  tyranny  like  the  tyranny  of 
false  motherhood  and  fatherhood.  But  the  true 
teacher,  through  reverence  for  the  younger  mind, 
earns  the  right  to  think  inside  it  and  so  inspires  and 
expands  it.  The  true  father  enters  into  the  joy  of 
the  deepest  comradeship  that  earth  can  know. 

Wherever  there  is  good  society.  Law  and  freedom 
become  correlative  terms.  Every  member  of  good 
society  knows  that  to  take  away  a  man's  freedom  is 
to  take  away  half  his  manhood,  to  make  solid  morality 
impossible.  "Zeus  takes  from  a  man  full  half  his 
character  when  the  day  of  servitude  overtakes  him." 
And  he  also  knows  that  no  freeman  can,  with  safety 

[70] 


LAW  THE  FINAL  PROBLEM  OF  LIFE 

and  security  for  his  own  individuality,  rule  and  domi- 
nate another  human  being.  Nothing  is  so  blinding 
as  sheer  supremacy.  The  freeman  lives  to  enfranchise 
other  men.  He  cannot  enter  upon  his  own  heritage, 
the  serene  self-knowledge  and  the  stanch  self-mastery 
of  the  personal  life,  unless  he  becomes  an  interpreter 
of  life  for  all  his  neighbors. 

In  order  to  keep  our  attention  fixed  upon  the  main 
point,  we  repeat  our  definition.  Law  is  the  corporate 
will  into  which  individuals,  in  proportion  to  their 
individuality,  build  their  several  wills.  Through 
that  corporate  will  moral  form  and  moral  value  are 
given  to  the  mass  of  human  experience.  The  corpo- 
rate will  with  the  corporate  need  from  which  it  springs 
is  the  place  where  the  living  God  reveals  Himself. 
Revelation  is  a  universal  process,  the  Bible  having  no 
monopoly  of  it.  It  goes  on  wherever  men  and  women 
of  mettle  and  breeding  devote  themselves  to  high  com- 
mon ends.  The  Bible  is  a  book  of  witness  to  the  nature 
and  the  logic  of  revelation.  It  is  the  inspired  body 
of  straight  thinking  upon  the  final  question.  Man's 
deepest  need  is  society  and  fellowship.    In  the  depth 

[71] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

of  that  need  God  reveals  Himself  as  the  builder  of 
good  society.  God  as  an  abstraction  is  outside  the 
most  vital  interests  of  man.  No  matter  how  we  seek 
to  glorify  Him  by  raising  His  metaphysical  attributes 
to  the  highest  power  of  omnipotence  and  omniscience, 
we  do  not  make  Him  the  actual  lord  and  master  of 
men.  Not  until  He  reveals  Himself  to  us  when  we  are 
strained  to  the  uttermost  by  our  task,  does  He  master 
us.  Then  He  makes  His  will  the  power  within  our  wills 
to  the  end  that  our  wills  may  find  themselves  within 
His  will.  God  is  no  abstraction.  He  is  the  sovereign 
personal  force.  His  personality  is  the  refuge  and 
strength  of  all  those  who  would  fain  live  the  personal 
life.  We  respect  ourselves  because  we  are  God's 
servants,  devoting  our  being  as  He  devotes  His  to  the 
supreme  task.  There  is  one  law  for  the  divine  and 
the  human  life.  We  accept  the  Master's  words  as 
a  revelation  of  God  and  an  interpretation  of  man. 
Blessed  are  the  peacemakers,  because,  being  like 
God,  God  shall  esteem  them  as  His  children. 

God's  will  is  the  spring  of  living  Law.     It  is  our 
authority,  high  above  our  wills  and  yet  within  them. 

[72] 


LAW  THE  FINAL  PROBLEM  OF  LIFE 

The  divine  restraint  and  freedom  are  the  foundation 
on  which  the  Christian  builds  his  hope  and  confi- 
dence. It  is  through  the  restraint  of  the  superior 
power  that  the  dependent  will  finds  within  the  supe- 
rior will  its  safeguard  and  shield.  Through  freedom 
the  superior  will  lives  and  labors  within  the  dependent 
will,  giving  it  sap  and  growth.  The  self-revelation 
of  the  stronger  is  the  means  whereby  the  weaker 
inherits  self-mastery  and  self-enjoyment.  This  is 
the  dominant  fact,  the  central  luminous  point,  in  the 
Christian's  view  of  his  world.  Restraint  and  freedom, 
indivisibly  one,  give  to  the  law  its  penetrating  power. 
God  carries  the  full  weight  of  His  desires  and  will  to 
the  very  depth  of  the  redeemed  man's  being.  And 
we,  redeemed,  fulfil  ourselves  by  living  the  redeeming 
life.  Like  God,  we  assert  our  freedom  through  re- 
straint. So  does  the  divine  will  through  us  become 
an  irresistible  authority,  a  Law  with  penetrating 
power. 


C73] 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE  MYSTERY  OP  PLEASURE 

THE  substance  of  Christianity  is  faith  in  good- 
ness. The  pith  of  the  Christian's  goodness 
is  the  good  will.  His  faith  in  God  is  a  high 
and  intense  action.  His  will,  at  home  within  the 
divine  will,  is,  like  the  divine  will,  creative.  He  takes 
life  in  its  unity.  Towards  the  Master  of  Life  his 
attitude  is  a  blending  of  intimacy  and  awe.  To  the 
Knight  in  the  "  Faerie  Queene  "  the  ideal  woman  he 
serves  is  his  "dear  Dreade."  So  to  the  Christian  the 
love  of  God  and  the  fear  of  Him  are  indissolubly 
blended. 

"  For  he  who  knows  not  how  to  love, 
Still  less  knows  how  to  fear." 

His  attitude  toward  the  Master  of  Life  determines 
his  attitude  toward  life  itself.  The  will  in  him,  being 
creative  and  a  part  of  the  power  through  which  God 

[74] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  PLEASURE 

publishes  His  holy  will,  has  a  tireless  energy  and  a 
resistless  penetrating  power.  As  he  goes  deep  into 
life  he  finds  himself  surrounded  and  beset  with  mystery. 
The  case  stands  with  him  as  with  the  scientific  stu- 
ent  of  our  time.  The  working  reason  of  science,  by 
close  and  unflagging  attention,  becomes  intimate  with 
some  small  section  of  the  Universe.  Then  straight- 
way the  immeasurable  sweep  of  the  Universe  sets 
upon  and  invades  the  mind,  just  as  a  great  tide  sets 
into  a  little  cove,  filling  it  brim  full  with  the  conscious- 
ness of  kinship  to  the  illimitable  deep.  Even  so  the 
redeemed  mind  and  will,  going  far  into  life,  cease- 
lessly attentive  to  its  meanings,  eagerly  interested  in 
its  unfolding,  is  set  upon  and  invaded  by  the  mystery 
of  human  destiny.  The  redeemed  will  deals  with 
life  as  a  whole  and  finds  it  infinite. 

It  is  a  matter  of  universal  experience  that  the  con- 
sciousness of  meaning  in  things  is  in  proportion  to  the 
sense  of  Law  in  things.  The  man  of  mere  impulse 
and  impression  flits  from  sensation  to  sensation,  as 
the  bee  flits  from  flower  to  flower.     He  can  have  no 

large  consciousness  of  the  meaning  of  nature  because 

[75] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

he  has  no  real  conception  of  Law.  But  the  man  of 
science,  for  whom  the  Universe  is  a  majestic  organism 
of  Law,  finds  unfathomed  depths  of  meaning  in  the 
lowliest  forms  of  life.  Now,  inasmuch  as  the  final 
problem  is  Law  and  inasmuch  as  the  Christian,  when 
he  outgrows  childish  things,  is  in  a  supreme  sense  the 
man  of  Law,  conceiving  it  to  be  his  task  to  bring  all 
human  experience  within  the  moral  order,  it  naturally 
follows  that,  the  riper  the  life  of  the  Christian  be- 
comes, the  more  is  it  surrounded  and  pervaded  with 
mystery. 

Meaning  and  mystery  are  in  direct  proportion. 
There  is  no  true  mystery  for  those  who  live  on  the 
surface  of  things.  And  because  there  is  no  true 
mystery,  there  is  likely  to  be  a  false  mystery,  the 
thrill  of  a  ghost  story,  an  artificial  miracle,  some 
superstition  disguised  as  piety.  But  for  those  who 
penetrate  into  the  interior  mieanings  of  life,  mystery 
is  on  all  sides.  Or  rather,  to  put  it  in  a  better  way, 
mystery  is  the  heart  and  soul  of  meaning. 

We  must  again  clear  our  minds.  We  inherit  a 
conception  of  mystery  which  will  not  help  us  to  make 

[76] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  PLEASURE 

the  right  approach  to  the  Atonement.  For  it  con- 
ceives of  mystery  as  a  truth  that  is  above  the  reach  of 
reason.  When,  however,  we  have  firmly  grasped  the 
unity  of  Christian  thought,  we  see  that  this  conception 
belongs  to  a  body  of  concepts  which,  if  we  would  keep 
in  our  hands  the  keys  of  Revelation,  we  cannot  accept. 
It  is  part  and  parcel  of  the  view  which  puts  the  monastic 
mystic  in  the  place  of  the  Christian  Prophet,  the 
Infallible  Church  in  the  place  of  the  belief  in  the 
Kingdom  of  God.  But  to  the  Christian  conscious- 
ness as  the  New  Testament  records  and  attests  it, 
faith  is  the  inner  action  of  the  whole  man.  Before  he 
is  redeemed,  all  divine  things  are  beyond  his  reach. 
But  when  he  is  redeemed,  he  has  the  mind  of  Christ. 
"  All  things  are  his,  because  he  is  Christ's,  and  Christ  is 
God*s."  Ever3i;hing  is  above  his  unaided  reason, 
that  is  to  say,  above  the  reason  that  is  not  inspired 
by  the  living  God.  But  when  he  learns  Christ,  God 
puts  the  world  in  his  heart.  He  can  know  nothing 
unless  it  be  given  him  from  above.  But  from  above 
Cometh  light  and  illumination,  flooding  his  entire  be- 
ing with  meanings  that  carry  with  them  the  promise 

[77] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

of  deeper  meanings.  Revelation  and  reason  cease 
to  be  terms  denoting  distinct  and  separate  regions  ol 
experience.  A  distinguished  scientist  once  said,  when 
about  to  perform  an  experiment  in  the  presence  of  his 
class,  "Now  let  us  ask  God  a  question."  Experi- 
ence is  unified  by  life  in  God.  Revelation  and  reason 
describe  two  aspects  of  a  single  and  indivisible  body 
of  experience.  Faith  includes  reason,  and  reason 
exercises  its  function  in  a  world  whose  possibility  of 
unity  rests  on  the  Unity  of  God. 

From  another  point  of  view,  the  mystery  which 
surrounds  and  informs  the  Christian's  experience  is 
the  result  of  the  relation  between  purpose  and  life. 
In  childhood  the  world  of  mystery  and  the  world  of 
consciousness  are  a  single  world.  The  heavenly 
game  of  make-believe,  so  becoming  to  the  child,  so 
unseemly  in  the  mature,  is  a  matter  of  course.  But 
the  unities  of  childhood  break  up  under  increasing  press- 
ure. Specialization  takes  the  place  of  the  child's  uni- 
versalism.  The  specializations,  as  a  rule,  become  hard 
and  narrow.  On  the  one  side  stands  common  sense, 
as  definite  and  as  finite  as  a  nail-hole  in  a  board. 

[78] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  PLEASURE 

On  the  other  side  stands  mystery,  as  remote  as  heaven. 
Some  tragic  experience,  the  death  of  one's  dearest, 
may  for  an  hour  or  so  weld  them  into  a  single  world. 
But,  for  the  most  part,  between  common  sense  and 
mystery  a  great  gulf  is  fixed.  When,  however,  we 
have  found  ourselves  in  Christ,  when  we  have  taken 
the  Kingdom  of  God  for  our  fixed  end  and  aim,  that 
sovereign  and  controlling  purpose  makes  us  both 
the  masters  and  the  servants  of  life.  Purpose  takes 
in  life.  Life,  while  infinitely  larger  than  purpose, 
steadily  offers  itself  to  purpose.  So  the  Christian 
will,  its  metal  being  highly  tempered,  penetrates  life 
and  finds  itself  enfolded  in  mystery.  Redemption 
is  the  final  and  inclusive  purpose.  Mystery  is  our 
highest  attainment,  the  privilege,  not  of  those  who 
know  least,  but  of  those  who  know  most;  the  pre- 
rogative, not  of  those  who  drift  and  dream,  but  of 
those  who  toil  mightily  in  the  service  of  eternal  ends. 
It  is  the  fundamental  attribute  of  the  illimitable  and 
immeasurable  life  challenging,  invading,  and  enlarging 
the  mind  and  purpose  of  man. 

If  we  carry  our  thoughts  about  pleasure  into  this 
[79] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

knowledge  about  God  and  man,  it  ceases  to  be  a 
strain  on  speech  to  call  pleasure  a  mystery.  In  our 
early  years  we  are  incapable  of  saying  it  honestly. 
We  act  upon  the  assumption  that  pain  and  sorrow 
and  loss  constitute  the  mystery  of  life.  We  assume 
that  the  presence  of  pain  in  our  world  calls  for  an 
explanation,  that  it  puts  God  on  the  defensive.  If  our 
world  contained  nothing  but  pleasure,  —  so  we  in- 
stinctively argue,  —  it  would  be  an  entirely  intel- 
ligible world,  our  faith  would  find  no  difficulties.  But 
this  is  the  logic  of  youth,  the  reasoning  of  those  who 
inherit,  not  of  those  who  create. 

The  truth  is  that  pleasure,  when  we  take  deep 
soundings  of  it,  is  as  mysterious  as  pain.  The  pleas- 
ures of  childhood  are  clearly  distinguished  from  the 
degrading  pleasures  of  the  deliberate  pleasure-seeker. 
They  are  both  the  condition  and  the  consequence 
of  growth  and  action.  The  child  makes  as  well  as 
finds  his  world.  And  it  is  in  the  ceaseless  intermin- 
gling of  the  two  elements  that  the  secret  of  childhood 
is   found.    Action   and   growth   are   the   springs   of 

childhood's  pleasures. 

[80] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  PLEASURE 

The  people  who  make  pleasure  a  profession,  and  so 
lose  the  secret  of  pleasure,  seek  for  pleasures  that  are 
largely  passive.  But  passive  pleasure,  no  matter  what 
its  motive  and  apparent  source,  is  dissipating  and 
degrading.  Even  the  pleasures  of  religion,  when 
they  are  nothing  better  than  a  riot  of  emotion,  are  a 
form  of  dissipation.  Pure  pleasure  is  the  condition 
and  the  consequence  of  action  and  purpose. 

And  its  reach  is  in  proportion  to  actidii>-Jts  history 
is  a  part  of  the  history  of  action.  The  depth  of  its 
root  is  in  keeping  with  the  breadth  and  elevation  of 
the  ends  to  which  men  and  women  devote  themselves. 
Pure  pleasures,  for  the  mature,  are  those  into  which 
goes  a  large  amount  of  purposive  energy.  The  daring 
swimmer  and  the  fearless  mountain-climber  give  to 
Nature  quite  as  much  as  they  take  from  her.  The 
joy  of  those  who  make  themselves  free  laborers  in 
the  service  of  the  common  weal,  the  joy  of  the 
teacher,  the  joys  of  the  friend  and  the  lover,  —  in  all 
these  highest  forms  of  pleasure  the  proportion  of 
action  and  purpose  is  very  large.  And  in  the  same 
degree  they  become  infinite  in  their  reach.  The  joys 
G  [81] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

of  self  soon  find  their  limits.  But  the  mental  pleasure 
of  the  disinterested  student  of  Nature  is  as  deep  as 
the  Universe.  The  joys  of  friendship  are  illimitable. 
The  happiness  that  our  friend's  happiness  gives  us 
cannot  be  measured  and  is  self-renewing. 

In  the  building  of  the  family  the  quality  and  the 
end  of  pure  pleasure  disclose  themselves  with  peculiar 
clearness.  A  man  and  a  woman  fall  in  love.  Emo- 
tional sexual  passion  draws  them  together.  But 
falling  in  love  is  only  the  beginning.  Those  who 
would  build  a  holy  family  must  climb.  To  become 
worthy  of  each  other  they  must  outgrow  and  transcend 
themselves.  The  family  is  the  proving-ground  of 
freedom.  Nowhere  can  tyranny  be  so  terrible.  The 
most  destructive  forms  of  egotism,  the  tyrannies  of 
lust  and  temper,  here  manifest  themselves.  But  the 
family,  in  its  conception  and  ideal,  is  the  nursery  of 
freedom.  The  man  and  the  woman,  whose  spirits 
and  whose  bodies  found  it,  by  mutual  reverence  and 
restraint  build  their  individual  wills  and  purposes  into 
a  corporate  will.  It  is  the  highest  privilege  of  each  to 
safeguard  the  rights  of  the  other.    And  through  their 

[82] 


THE  MYSTERY  OP  PLEASURE 

common  unstinted  devotion  to  their  children  they 
exalt  themselves,  each  crowning  the  other. 

From  the  family  flow  the  deepest  springs  of  pleasure. 
Within  its  precincts  infinite  values  abound.  Love 
obliterates  the  distinction  between  little  things  and 
great  things.  To  the  lover  the  ribbon  or  the  glove 
his  dear  one  has  worn  is  above  price.  The  creative 
love  that  builds  the  holy  family  has  the  same  trans- 
figuring power.  The  little  and  the  great  are  caught 
up  together  into  the  mystery  of  the  creative  life. 

The  training  schools  of  friendship  and  the  family 
find  their  goal  and  consummation  in  the  building  of 
good  society,  in  the  founding  of  the  Kingdom  of  God. 
For  here  creative  action  is  at  its  height.  There  is  a 
widespread  but  vicious  conception  of  salvation  which 
makes  man's  part  in  salvation  a  passive  one.  On  the 
contrary,  our  relation  to  God  is  the  field  of  most  in- 
tense action.  It  is  true  that,  in  the  saving  of  the  soul, 
in  the  creation  of  personality,  God  does  all.  But  He 
does  nothing  unless  through  us.  Our  relation  to  Him 
is  not  passive.  It  is  the  intensest  receptivity.  Now 
receptivity    means    appreciation.    And    appreciation 

[83] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

necessitates  action.  The  appreciation  of  noble  things, 
a  great  picture  or  a  great  book  for  example,  puts  our 
best  faculties  and  powers  on  the  stretch.  The  enjoy- 
ment of  classical  literature  has  to  be  earned  by  severe 
labor,  while  the  beauty  and  majesty  of  human  charac- 
ter are  given  only  to  those  who  toil  mightily  to  make 
themselves  worthy.  Even  so  with  salvation.  We 
are  saved  when  God  reveals  Himself  in  our  hearts  as 
the  living  God,  the  creative  Good.  Salvation  involves 
the  highest  form  of  appreciation  and  admiration. 
Awe  of  God's  being  and  will  and  admiration  of  His 
majesty  and  beauty  fill  our  souls  with  ecstasy  and 
peace.  Our  being  is  stirred  to  its  depths.  The  spirit 
in  us  is  enkindled  to  intensest  action.  And  our  wills 
lay  hold  on  life  with  a  masterful  grip. 

Like  God,  we  live  the  creative  life.  We  sum  up 
our  joys  in  the  joy  of  the  Lord.  Surrendering  ourselves 
to  the  Unity  of  God,  we  find  within  our  own  being  the 
source  of  unity  and  coherence,  of  meaning  and  value 
in  experience.  The  cheap  mysteries  of  worldliness  — 
we  outgrow  them  and  leave  them  behind.  The  seat 
of  mystery  is  in  our  hearts.    Our  faith  in  God  and  man 

[84] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  PLEASURE 

is  our  supreme  action.  Out  of  a  great-hearted  faith 
issues  an  eager  interest  in  human  affairs,  a  tireless 
attention  to  human  needs  and  problems,  a  penetrating 
purpose  which  all  the  forces  of  selfishness  and  inertia 
cannot  resist.  The  wide  world  becomes  our  heritage. 
The  mystery  and  meaning  of  things  open  to  us  day 
by  day.  With  St.  Paul,  as  an  American  poet  has 
paraphrased  him,  we  sing  the  praise  of  creative  love  — 

"Had  I  not  love,  although  my  voice  bade  men  and 
angels  all  rejoice  with  harmonies  above,  alas,  it  were  in 
vain  !  Alas  !  but  cymbal's  sound  of  tinkling  brass,  and 
nought  my  gain,  and  nought  my  gain,  had  I  not  love ! 

"Though  I  were  fain  of  mysteries  and  prophecies, 
and  though  I  knew  all  secrecies  of  earth  below  and 
heaven  above,  and  even  although  my  faith  doth  prove 
mighty  to  move  yon  mountain's  mass,  it  were  in  vain 
had  I  not  love ! 

"And  even  although  with  glad  desire  my  goods  I 

give  that  starving  men  may  take  and  live;  though 

at  the  stake  in  flame  of  fire,  I  die  for  the  Redeemer's 

name,  and  have  not  love,  it  were  but  shame ! 

[85] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

"He,  in  whose  mind  the  heavenly  love  its  home 
doth  make,  will  suffer  long  and  still  be  kind  for  love's 
dear  sake ! 

"  Love  vaunteth  not,  for  in  its  heart  no  vanity  or 
pride  hath  part. 

"  It  moveth  all  to  courtesy ;  it  doth  not  seek  its  own ; 
it  is  not  angered  easily ;  it  loveth  not  iniquity ;  it  loves 
the  truth  alone. 

"All  things  it  bears;  it  has  all  faith;  all  hopes  it 
shares,  nor  doth  it  fail  though  railing  tongues  assail  it. 

"  Love  doth  not  fail,  but  prophecies  and  all  the  lore 
of  tongues  shall  cease,  and  knowledge  too  shall  be  no 
more. 

"In  this  brief  day  we  know  in  part,  but  when  we 
perfect  are  in  heart,  our  partial  knowledge  will  not 
last,  but  pass  away. 

"In  infant's  swaddling  bands  confined,  I  had  the 
infant's  tongue  and  mind,  but  the  strong  man  is  not 
beguiled  by  the  weak  fancies  of  the  child  ! 

"Still,  still  we  see  all  things  that  pass,  darkly  as  in 
a  wizard's   glass,  but  when  we  gain  heaven's  perfect 

grace  we  shall  see  all  things  face  to  face ! 

[86] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  PLEAStJRE 

"  For  here  below  small  is  the  part,  I  e'er  can  know 
of  God's  great  All;  but  there  on  high  before  God's 
throne,  there  I  —  even  I  also  —  shall  know  as  I  am 
known ! 

"And  now  remains  faith,  hope,  and  love,  these  three, 
the  greatest  of  God's  train.  And  greatest  of  the  three 
is  love." 

Devotion  to  the  moral  order  gives  us  training  in 
moral  and  spiritual  taste.  This  training  brings  us 
pleasures  that  are  both  strong  and  subtle.  Taste  in 
other  fields  of  experience  opens  to  us  the  under  mean- 
ings of  beauty.  Looking  at  a  meadow  in  late  sunmier, 
the  blunt  and  untrained  eye  gets  only  the  self-evident 
colors.  The  trained  eye  sees  those  under  colors  that 
give  body  and  depth  to  the  main  color.  So  does  severe 
training  of  the  moral  taste  enrich  us  with  the  under 
meanings  of  life.  We  take  the  keenest  delight  in  little 
things,  knowing  them  to  be  the  hiding-place  of  the 
infinite  and  the  eternal.  Putting  our  envies  and  jeal- 
ousies under  our  feet,  we  find  large  pleasure  in  the 
good  work  of  other  men  and  women.     High  and  sus- 

[87] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

talned  action  along  personal  lines  of  choice  and  en- 
deavor fits  us  to  appreciate  and  admire  their  work. 
Edwin  Booth,  by  devotion  to  the  actor's  art,  was  enabled 
to  say,  "  I  count  no  man  happy  until  he  is  able  to  re- 
joice over  the  success  of  his  rival."  And  the  people 
who  have  been  redeemed  by  the  Lord,  through  devo- 
tion to  the  Kingdom  of  God,  have  made  the  Beatitudes 
their  own,  and  can  say :  — 

"  Happy  are  they  who,  conscious  of  a  supreme  task, 
are  humble  at  heart,  for  to  them  belongs  the  key  of 
Heaven. 

"  Happy  they  who  grieve  over  the  world's  sin  and 
shame,  for  God  shall  comfort  them. 

"  Happy  they  who  in  the  presence  of  God  and  man 
are  lowly-minded,  for  they  shall  inherit  the  earth. 

"Happy  they  who  hunger  and  thirst  after  right- 
eousness and  justice,  for  God  shall  feed  them  full. 

"Happy  they  who  rise  to  great-hearted  sjonpathy 
with  others,  for  God*s  mercy  and  sympathy  shall 
enfold  them. 

"Happy  they  in  whom  steady  devotion  to  the  su- 
[88] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  PLEASURE 

preme  human  end  has  given  purity  of  heart,  for  they 
shall  see  God. 

"Happy  they  who  make  glad  the  heart  of  man 
with  the  tidings  of  peace,  for  God  will  claim  them  and 
proclaim  them  as  His  children." 

Our  highest  right  is  the  right  to  joy.  Without  it 
we  lose  our  right  to  ourselves.  Without  joy  there  can 
be  no  deep  knowledge  of  self,  no  large  self-mastery, 
no  generous  and  resonant  action.  But  our  right  to 
joy  is  not  assured  to  us  until  we  make  the  Kingdom 
of  God  our  law  and,  sustained  by  a  mighty  faith  in 
God  and  man,  become  creators  of  good.  Then  vicari- 
ousness  in  pleasure  is  quite  as  fundamental  a  truth  as 
vicariousness  in  pain.  Our  last  word  about  pleasure 
is  —  it  is  a  mystery ;  it  is  one  name  for  the  redeemed 
life  that  is  forever  unfolding  new  meanings  to  us. 


[89] 


CHAPTER  Vn 


THE  MYSTERY  OP  PAIN' 


MYSTERY,  as  we  have  seen,  is  the  outer 
aspect  of  meaning.  The  fuller  life  is  of 
meaning,  the  more  deeply  does  it  enter  into 
mystery.  We  have  also  seen  that  meaning  and  mys- 
tery are  in  proportion  to  purpose.  Given  a  masterful 
and  penetrating  purpose  that  grips  life  hard  and  pierces 
it  through  with  interpreting  power,  then  mystery  be- 
comes the  very  heart  of  existence.  It  is  but  another 
name  for  the  unity  and  immeasurableness  of  expe- 
rience. Wave  on  wave  it  comes  upon  us  out  of  the 
great  deep.  Now  the  Christian,  being  a  person  re- 
deemed from  vanity  and  fear,  is  possessed  by  the 
supreme  purpose  called  the  Kingdom  of  God,  which 
b  nothing  less  than  God's  proposal,  made  to  us  through 
Christ,  to  moralize  human  life  as  a  whole.  Christ 
has  put  us  under  bonds  to  realize  the  ideal  of  fellow- 

[90] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  PAIN 

ship.  To  pay  our  debt  to  Him,  we  must  have  a  pro- 
found belief  in  man.  Controlled  by  that  belief,  when- 
ever we  touch  our  neighbors,  we  touch  infinite  and 
eternal  values.  So  the  key-note  of  the  Christian  life 
is  mystery,  that  is  to  say,  we  know  the  infinite  just  far 
enough  to  make  it  intimate  and  friendly.  But  the 
little  we  know  must  be  constantly  transcending  itself, 
under  peril  of  shrivelling  into  commercially  valuable 
but  spiritually  noxious  common  sense. 

The  true  criticism  of  life  springs  from  faith  in  life. 
Every  real  critic  of  a  thing  must  be  a  believer  in  it. 
Only  through  belief  in  it,  through  surrender  of  mind 
and  will  and  attention  to  it,  can  he  understand  and 
interpret  it.  The  commonest  wayside  weed  will  not 
unlock  its  secret  unless  the  observer  approaches  it 
with  eager  interest  and  untiring  attention.  How 
much  less  the  mystery  of  life !  Belief  in  life  is  the 
unconditional  requirement  for  criticism  of  life.  The 
reasons  for  pessimism  are  ample,  if  we  choose  to  look 
for  them.  Under  certain  conditions  pessimism  is 
Bottom's  part  in  the  play.  Anybody  can  do  it  ex- 
tempore.    But  the  followers  of  Jesus  are  people  of 

[91] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

heroic  will.  They  have  been  brought  into  quick- 
ening touch  with  the  supreme  hope.  Human  life 
in  its  full  scope  acquires  thereby  an  infinite  value. 
We  face  life  with  our  eyes  open.  We  know  full 
well  the  sin  and  weakness  of  our  own  hearts,  the 
wickedness  and  brutality  of  our  world.  But  Christ 
hath  dedicated  us  to  a  sovereign  hope  and  hopeful- 
ness. So,  facing  life,  we  will  not  let  the  vision  of 
Heaven  distract  our  attention  from  the  Kingdom  of 
God.  We  see  Heaven  shining,  not  above  life,  but 
through  life. 

The  elements  of  life  are  pleasure  and  pain.  The 
business  of  life  consists  in  a  wise  and  masterful  han- 
dling of  its  pleasures  and  its  pains.  Pleasure,  we  know, 
becomes  a  mystery  to  men  and  women  who  have  been 
redeemed.  We  drink  of  God's  pleasures  as  out  of  a 
river,  and  every  pleasure  is  a  key  to  the  deeper  knowl- 
edge of  God,  a  more  intimate  fellowship  with  man. 
But  while  pleasure,  deeply  understood,  is  quite  as  mys- 
terious as  pain,  owing  to  our  natural  point  of  view 
in  earlier  years,  pain  is  our  most  difficult  problem. 
We  speak  of  the  mystery  of  pain  with  an  emphasis 

[92] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  PAIN 

we  find  it  difficult  to  equal  when  we  speak  of  the 
mystery  of  pleasure. 

At  the  outset  it  is  forced  on  our  attention  that  faith 
itself  creates  some  difficult  problems  and  so  becomes 
responsible  for  some  acute  mental  pains.  If  we 
could  let  our  attention  slide  off  into  the  dualist's  inter- 
pretation of  the  world,  a  large  part  of  our  difficulties 
would  fall  away  at  once.  For  we  should  then  have 
a  force  independent  of  God  and  dividing  the  field  of 
reality  with  Him.  To  this  independent  force  or  being 
we  could  ascribe  all  evil,  leaving  God  free  to  claim 
for  Himself  the  good  alone.  No  matter  how  great 
a  burden  of  suffering  and  sorrow  we  might  have  to 
bear  at  times,  our  minds  would  be  free  from  the  tor- 
ture of  doubts  disputing  God's  wisdom  and  impugning 
His  goodness.  Or  suppose  that,  while  believing  in 
the  unity  of  the  Universe  and  in  the  divine  unity 
underlying  and  upholding  it,  we  were  not  troubled  by 
a  cultivated  conscience.  Suppose  that  our  crowning 
and  critical  faculty  were  a  pure  contemplative  or 
scientific  reason.    We  could  still  pay  our  moral  debts 

with  a  fair  degree  of  ease.    For  we  should  take  God 

[9S] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

and  the  world  together  as  constituting  a  vast  organism 
of  force  whose  irresistible  push  and  thrust  make 
everything  that  happens  right.  But  when  we  have 
accepted  the  existence  of  a  personal  holy  and  loving 
God,  the  sustainer  and  guardian  of  a  moral  order, 
our  faith  itself  gives  birth  to  immense  diflSculties. 
We  are  forced  to  judge  ourselves  and  the  order  of 
things  in  which  we  exist  in  the  light  of  the  perfect  ideal. 
How  can  God  carry  His  case  before  conscience  ? 
The  incredible  mass  of  pain  and  evil  in  this  world  — 
how  can  we  face  it  frankly  and  still  adore  Him? 
Use  the  idea  of  evolution  as  we  will,  while  it  greatly 
alleviates  our  diflSculties,  it  cannot  remove  them. 
The  horror  of  sin  in  our  hearts  remains.  The  more 
nearly  we  approach  the  ideal,  the  more  keenly  are  we 
tortured  by  our  failure  to  reach  it.  We  undergo  the 
keenest  form  of  that  pain  which  intimacy  with  the 
perfect  inevitably  brings.  The  scholar  subjects  him- 
self to  mental  torture  over  a  minute  question.  The 
lover  of  literary  beauty  agonizes  over  the  choice  of  a 
word.  An  artist  slays  himself  because  the  work  of 
his  hand  is  so  far  below  the  vision  of  his  mind.    The 

[94] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  PAIN 

Christian's  consciousness  of  sin,  because  he  is  intimate 
with  the  perfect  good,  raises  this  form  of  pain  to  its 
highest  power.  Yet  he  would  not,  if  the  whole  world 
were  offered  him,  cast  in  his  lot  with  the  lovers  of  ease 
who  avoid  the  cross  and  cast  their  souls  away. 

The  hideous  mass  of  sin  and  pain  in  our  nation  and 
race  cannot  be  made  tolerable  by  the  philosophy  of 
evolution  unless  we  carry  our  philosophy  far  away  from 
politics  and  trade  and  the  slums  into  some  private 
pleasure-house  of  ease.  As  honest  folk,  we  must 
admit  that  our  Christianity  creates  difficulties  which 
a  lower  level  of  belief  avoids.  And  these  difficulties 
pierce  us  through  with  pain. 

But  the  creative  will  and  purpose  in  us  which  cause 
the  difficulties  give  us  ennobling  patience  in  handling 
them.  No  matter  how  severe  the  difficulties  at  times 
become,  there  is  unity  in  them.  Now  as  long  as  a 
view  and  interpretation  of  things  unifies  our  experience, 
our  problems  included,  we  have  the  wherewithal  of 
noble  living.  If  our  unifying  view  brings  difficulties 
to  light,  we  are  to  take  them  as  a  part  of  the  whole. 
Problems   are   as   necessary   as  the  truth.     Indeed, 

[95] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

there  is  no  vital  truth  without  problems.  Unity  in 
diflSculties  is  a  part  of  saving  truth.  It  is  the  diffi- 
culties that  have  no  unity  in  them,  and  so  lack  all 
promise  of  ultimate  values,  which  dissipate  our  will 
and  so  unman  us.  The  Christian  view  and  purpose 
that  create  these  difficulties  enable  us  to  accept  the 
pains  they  impose  upon  us  as  an  organic  part  of  the 
redemptive  life.  The  savage,  having  no  conception 
of  the  unity  of  nature,  is  free  from  piercing  mental 
problems.  The  man  of  science,  dominated  by  that 
conception,  is  sometimes  whipped  and  scourged  by 
problems.  But  his  problems  are  his  heritage.  The 
great  conception  that  creates  them  dowers  them  with 
the  promise  of  meaning.  Even  so,  the  very  difficulties 
of  our  faith  contain  the  promise  of  intimate  and  in- 
terior knowledge  of  life.  Pain,  no  matter  what  its 
mass,  is  a  true  mystery,  because  apart  from  it  the 
deepest  meanings  of  life  stubbornly  refuse  to  unlock 
their  doors. 

It  is  with  the  study  of  pain  as  with  the  study  of 
pleasure.  The  key  is  action.  The  higher  the  reach 
of  our  pleasures,  the  larger  our  personal  share  in  their 

[96] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  PAIN 

making.  And  when  pleasure  attains  its  noblest 
and  most  enduring  levels,  the  element  of  action  is  at 
its  highest  power.  The  same  rule  holds  good  of  our 
pains. 

Take  the  world's  pain  in  the  mass.  Can  we  make 
it  intelligible?  When  it  strikes  those  we  love,  is  it 
morally  bearable?  Bear  it  physically-  we  must. 
But  can  we  reconcile  ourselves  to  it  as  part  of  a  divine 
plan  and  scheme  ?  Our  own  pain,  if  we  have  good 
mettle  in  us,  we  can  bear  in  silence  lest  we  increase  the 
world's  burden.  But  the  pain  and  sorrow  that  cause 
the  sword  to  go  through  the  heart  of  a  friend  —  can 
we  make  them  any  part  of  a  holy  and  unwasteful 
plan? 

The  strength  to  wait  even  when  we  cannot  under- 
stand comes  to  us  when,  turning  from  the  pain  toward 
which  we  stand  passive  and  which  puts  a  veto  upon 
action,  we  consider  the  pain  that  is  a  vital  and  neces- 
sary part  of  high  and  resonant  action. 

The  moral  element  in  pain  is  clearly  seen  when  we 
look  upon  our  life  in  time  and  space  as  a  training- 
school  for  the  spirit.  There  is  a  time-element  in 
H  [97] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

goodness  which  increases  with  the  range  and  reach 
of  action.  The  higher  the  end  toward  which  the 
spirit  in  us  strains,  the  more  distant  it  becomes.  The 
pain  of  suspense  is  increased  in  the  same  measure. 
Yet  the  suspense  is  essential  to  the  goodness  of  the 
action.  Human  goodness,  freed  from  the  pains  of 
suspense,  would  be  a  matter  of  feeling  and  emotion 
alone,  a  succession  of  impressions  and  without  organ- 
izing power.  Space  joins  with  time  to  make  us  free 
spirits.  Separation  from  those  we  love  helps  us  to 
know  whether  we  can  see  the  unseen  or  not.  To 
little  children  even  a  mother  long  absent  is  as  good 
as  non-existent.  To  mature  souls  the  absent  are 
spiritually  and  really  present.  The  pain  and  ache  of 
separation  purify  our  passions,  lifting  us  above  the 
ebb  and  flow  of  sensuous  emotion.  In  the  training- 
school  of  time  and  space  the  mind,  to  use  Plato's 
words,  becomes  the  place  of  the  body.  And  the  kind 
of  pain  in  which  mind  and  will  freely  play  a  part, 
thus  acting  as  a  leaven,  is  the  necessary  means  to  that 
great  end. 
Another  form  of  this  selfsame  pain  is  imposed 
[98] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  PAIN 

upon  us  by  that  tragic  disproportion  between  our  plan 
of  work  and  our  time  for  work,  which  the  passing  years 
bring  in  their  train.  The  better  and  the  larger  the 
work  one  longs  to  do,  the  wider  and  the  deeper  yawns 
the  gulf  between  desire  and  deed.  But  we  freely  make 
the  pain  our  personal  possession  and  so  transform 
its  tragic  quality.  For  in  no  other  way  can  the  in- 
finitude of  truth  be  brought  home  to  us.  Our  limita- 
tions of  time  and  strength  become  the  bonds  of  en- 
nobling fellowship  and  the  possibilities  of  revelation. 
By  their  means  we  may  become,  if  we  will,  lowly- 
minded  and  heroic  citizens  in  the  commonwealth 
of  man.  And  through  them,  if  we  go  deep  enough 
into  them,  God  reveals  Himself  with  irresistible  force 
and  appeal. 

Confusion  of  mind  arises  from  our  everyday  thought 
regarding  vicarious  pain.  We  are  apt  to  speak  of  it 
as  if  it  were  in  a  class  by  itself  and  as  if  it  gave  us  the 
one  helpful  analogy  to  the  Atonement.  For  the  sake 
of  clearness  and  consistency  we  had  better  drop  the 
word  "  vicarious"  altogether,  or  else  give  it  a  wider 
application.    What  is  called  vicarious  pain  is  an  inte- 

[99] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

gral  element  of  the  corporate  life.  Whenever  men  and 
women  live  as  persons,  that  is,  whenever  they  claim 
the  lives  and  souls  of  other  people  as  their  workshop 
and  playground,  vicarious  pain  is  as  inevitable  as  the 
tides.  In  the  degree  to  which  we  build  our  wills 
into  a  corporate  will,  finding  and  fulfilling  our  being 
in  a  common  need  and  good,  does  pain  come  to  us 
through  the  existence  and  the  actions  of  others.  If 
we  are  passive  toward  it,  it  becomes  a  part  of  the 
world's  pain  which,  looked  at  in  the  mass,  seems 
wasteful  and  unintelligible.  It  increases  "the  heavy 
and  the  weary  weight  of  all  this  unintelligible  world.** 
But  if  we  freely  accept  it  as  the  price  we  pay  for  our 
high  privilege  of  living  and  finding  our  being  in  others, 
then  the  pain  becomes  intelligible  pain.  It  is  re- 
demptive, and  justifies  itself  in  increments  of  character. 
Vicarious  pain,  when  we  regard  it  in  its  relation  to  the 
corporate  life,  is  seen  to  be  a  universal  human  quality. 
In  the  building  of  the  family  vicarious  pain  is  a 
law  ceaselessly  operative.  He  who  has  seen  the  trans- 
figured face  of  a  young  mother,  when  the  agony  and 
the  terror  of  birth  pains  are  over  and  her  child  has 
[100] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  PAIN 

come  safely  to  the  light,  has  learned  the  secret  of  the 
family  life  at  its  best.  It  is  built  up  on  numberless 
self-denials,  on  ceaseless  self-sacrifice.  While  the 
human  atom  —  if  there  be  such  a  thing  —  is  exposed 
to  wounds  from  one  direction,  the  men  and  women 
who  join  their  souls  as  well  as  their  bodies  to  build 
the  family  are  open  to  wounds  from  a  dozen  directions. 
When  we  enter  deeply  into  the  corporate  life,  two  things 
happen  to  us.  On  the  one  hand,  we  accept  the  lives 
and  fortunes  and  characters  of  other  people  as  our 
responsibility.  On  the  other  hand,  we  become  keenly 
sensitive  to  hurts.  So  in  every  way  we  are  made  more 
liable  to  pain.  And  our  liability  to  pain  is  the  noblest 
attribute  of  our  humanity. 

This  is  because  in  the  family  life  the  active  element 
and  quality  that  ennoble  pain  are  carried  to  a  great 
height.  We  act  within  others.  The  Epicurean  had 
a  fine  saying,  "  My  friend  is  my  stage."  A  true  mem- 
ber of  a  family  finds  his  stage  in  the  lives  of  those  he 
loves.  His  chief  calling  is  to  play  his  part  on  that  stage 
with  freedom  from  self-consciousness,  with  earnest- 
ness and  power.  Hence  he  becomes  possessed  of 
[101] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

a  manifold  individuality.  His  liability  to  pain  and 
his  sensitiveness  to  pain  increase  together. 

The  redeemed  life  raises  this  active  element  in  pain 
to  the  highest  power.  Devoting  ourselves  to  the 
Kingdom  of  God,  we  turn  its  clear  light  on  the  sin  and 
imperfection  of  our  inner  life.  The  least  spot  upon 
our  spiritual  honor,  the  least  thing  that  lessens  our 
serviceableness  to  Christ, — we  feel  it  like  a  stain. 
Conscience  kindles  in  us  the  fires  of  purgatory.  And 
all  these  pains  of  the  cross  we  gladly  bear.  For 
through  them  the  dross  and  weakness  of  our  mortal 
nature  are  removed.  The  world  is  crucified  unto  us 
and  we  unto  the  world.  Our  vanities  and  our  fears 
are  slain  together.  The  will  within  us  exalts  itself 
through  faith  and  so  becomes  a  part  of  the  eternal 
will  that  makes  for  the  world's  righteousness  and  right. 
We  bear  our  pains  with  gladness. 

As  our  Lord  freely  chose  the  cross  that  He  might 
purge  the  hope  of  His  nation  from  its  vulgarity  and 
its  violence,  so  we,  walking  in  His  footsteps,  freely  and 
joyously  choose  the  cross.  For  the  joy  that  was 
set  before  Him,  the  joy  coming  to  the  founder  of  God's 
[10«] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  PAIN 

Kingdom,  He  endured  the  cross  and  made  light  of 
its  shame.  We,  devoting  ourselves  to  His  purpose 
and  plan,  make  our  hearts  springs  of  hope  and  re- 
freshment to  our  fellows.  We  make  our  wills  the 
source  of  penetrating  and  cleansing  Law.  We  rule 
over  others  by  serving  and  interpreting  them.  The 
result  is  a  growing  body  of  redemptive  pain. 

The  Christian  law  of  life  is  expressed  by  St.  Paul 
in  words  that  seem  to  be  a  paradox,  but  are  in  truth 
the  sober  expression  of  ultimate  experience.  Each 
member  of  the  blessed  and  saving  society  of  Jesus 
will  seek  to  bear  his  neighbors'  burdens.  At  the  same 
time  he  will  seek  to  bear  his  own  burden.  And  so  the 
common  and  corporate  hope  of  perfection  inspires  all 
to  care  for  each  and  strengthens  each  to  care  for  all. 
The  roots  of  fellowship  go  deeper  and  deeper  into 
human  nature.  And  forth  from  the  deep  of  human 
nature  wells  up  the  revelation  of  the  living  God. 

Private  pains  and  griefs  pierce  us  through.     But 

as  Christ  trains  us,  more  and  more  it  comes  to  be  the 

case  that  our  sorest  griefs  are  griefs  over  the  state  of 

our  nation  and  race.    The  Christian  consciousness, 
[108] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

saved  for  the  supreme  hope,  yet  in  closest  touch  with 
the  world,  is  like  the  mother  in  our  Lord's  words, 
"  A  woman  when  she  is  in  travail  hath  sorrow,  because 
her  hour  is  come :  but  as  soon  as  she  is  delivered  of 
the  child,  she  remembereth  no  more  the  anguish,  for 
joy  that  a  man  is  born  into  the  world.*'  For  out  of 
Christian  consciousness  is  bom  the  confidence  that 
makes  a  perfect  fellowship  possible.  And  such  con- 
fidence may  not  be  had  apart  from  the  pains  of  mental 
and  moral  suspense  that  test  our  faith  whether  it  be 
of  God,  or  whether  it  be  of  ourselves  and  owes  its 
birth  to  the  favor  of  genial  temperament  and  kindly 
circumstance. 

Pain  is  not  an  intrusive  element  in  life.  Death  is 
not  the  great  intruder.  Our  friends  make  life  spacious 
by  living,  and  by  dying  leaven  life  with  an  unseen 
reality  which  is  the  source  and  guarantee  of  abiding 
values.  Living  and  dying,  we  eternize  ourselves 
through  the  cross. 

Even  as  the  joys  of  life  sum  themselves  up  in  the  joy 
of  the  Lord,  so  the  sorrows  of  life  sum  themselves 
up  in  our  sorrow  that  the  Kingdom  of  God,  perfect 
[104] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  PAIN 

human  fellowship,  should  be  so  far  from  us.  In- 
evitably the  joy  and  the  pain  are  blended  into  a  single 
emotion.  Indeed,  it  is  a  fundamental  law  regarding 
all  the  deepest  joys  and  pains,  that  they  merge  into 
one  another.  Hence  the  great.  Apostle,  after  he  has 
sung  his  song  of  triumphant  joy  ending  in  "Nothing 
shall  separate  us  from  the  love  of  Christ,'*  passes 
straight  into  the  mood  of  grief  and  pain.  "Brethren, 
my  heart's  desire  for  Israel  is  that  they  should  be 
saved."  The  joy  of  those  who  break  bread  in  the 
Kingdom  of  God  is  inseparable  from  redemptive  pain. 
But  joy,  not  pain,  is  the  inclusive  and  controlling 
emotion. 

We  are  not  worthy  to  enjoy  the  beatific  vision  stead- 
ily. But  sometimes  it  comes  to  us,  that  blessed  mood 
in  which  the  certainty  of  redemption  possesses  us. 
God's  holy  will  our  law  !  Our  wills,  knit  together,  the 
spring  of  the  law  of  fellowship  !  As  on  a  clear  day 
one  sees  a  far  distant  sea  or  mountain,  so  in  this 
blessed  mood  we  have  vision  of  the  city  of  God  coming 
out  of  heaven  and  taking  possession  of  the  earth. 

Then  with  Paul  we  sing:  "Who  shall  separate  us 
[105] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

from  the  love  of  Christ?  shall  tribulation,  or  dis- 
tress, or  persecution,  or  famine,  or  nakedness,  or 
peril,  or  sword  ?  As  it  is  written.  For  thy  sake  we  are 
killed  all  the  day  long ;  we  are  accounted  as  sheep  for 
the  slaughter.  Nay,  in  all  these  things  we  are  more 
than  conquerors  through  him  that  loved  us.  For  I  am 
persuaded  that  neither  death,  nor  life,  nor  angels,  nor 
principalities,  nor  powers,  nor  things  present,  nor 
things  to  come,  nor  height,  nor  depth,  nor  any  other 
creature,  shall  be  able  to  separate  us  from  the  love 
of  God,  which  is  in  Christ  Jesus  our  Lord.** 


[106] 


CHAPTER  VIII 


FORGIVENESS   AND   LAW 


WE  must  keep  our  eyes  fixed  steadily  on  a 
single  point,  if,  coming  to  the  end  of  our 
study,  we  are  to  find  the  Atonement,  as  a 
process  and  action,  inevitable  both  for  God  and 
man.  The  view  of  the  Atonement  which  served  our 
ancestors'  needs  leaves  us  cold.  Its  foundations  were 
laid  in  the  Middle  Ages.  God  was  thought  of  as 
being  in  His  Heaven.  Revelation  was  a  closed  pro- 
cess, and  its  records  were  in  the  keeping  of  an  in- 
fallible Church.  The  work  of  the  Church  was  to  save 
souls.  She  was  distinct  and  separate  from  the  State. 
While  she  gave  immense  gifts  to  civilization  and 
morality,  the  problem  of  Law  was  not  her  primary 
problem.  The  single  soul  was  the  unit  of  thought  and 
feeling.  The  spiritually  minded  men  and  women, 
for  the  most  part,  were  in  the  monastery  and  the 
[107] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

nunnery.  The  interests  that  go  into  the  family  and 
the  commonwealth  were  looked  upon  as  secondary. 
They  were  no  part  of  primary  reality,  of  the  innermost 
core  of  life.  Hence  under  the  pressure  of  speculation 
and  mysticism  they  readily  gave  ground.  In  the  last 
analysis  they  did  not  enter  into  the  idea  of  God  and 
the  conception  of  man. 

Under  these  conditions  the  Atonement  was  thought 
of  as  a  propitiation  offered  to  God,  to  make  good  the 
injury  done  His  majesty  and  honor  by  man's  sin  and 
self-centredness.  The  object  of  the  Incarnation  was 
to  impart  to  the  human  actions  and  merits  of  the 
Saviour  such  transcendent  value  that  He  could  bring 
the  propitiation  up  to  the  level  of  the  offence  against 
God*s  infinite  majesty.  The  propitiation  being  made, 
the  divine  forgiveness  followed. 

But  there  is  a  fatal  criticism  upon  this  view.  If 
the  divine  forgiveness  is  conditioned  on  propitiation, 
then  it  ceases  to  be  free  forgiveness.  It  is  not  for- 
giveness in  the  full  sense.  If  propitiation  is  first  made, 
then  forgiveness  must  follow  as  a  matter  of  fair  dealing. 
If  God  did  not  forgive,  He  would  be  unjust.  God 
[108] 


FORGIVENESS  AND  LAW 

does  not,  then,  forgive  freely.  His  forgiveness  is 
earned.  It  is  true  that  at  bottom  the  Atonement  is 
conceived  as  God's  own  action,  since  it  is  the  Incarna- 
tion alone  that  gives  value  to  the  propitiation.  Yet, 
when  the  last  statement  is  made,  the  thought  is  unclear. 
The  free  creative  action  of  God  is  overclouded  and 
obscured. 

The  conditions  under  which  we  must  think  out  our 
view  of  the  Atonement,  if  we  are  again  to  have  a  view 
that  will  quicken  our  emotions  and  heighten  our 
gratitude,  are  widely  different.  As  we  have  seen,  we 
must  disregard  the  distinction  between  this  world  and 
the  other  world,  taking  life  in  its  unity  with  the  Divine 
Unity  as  the  source  of  sanity  and  hope.  Logical  and 
consistent  monotheism  gives  us  a  single  and  invisible 
universe  within  which  we  must  find  ourselves  and 
wherein  we  must  achieve  self-knowledge  and  self- 
mastery.  In  like  manner  we  have  to  neglect,  for  the 
time  being,  the  distinction  between  Church  and  State. 
We  make  our  start  with  the  conviction  that  the  ultimate 
problem  is  Law,  the  spring  and  confidence  of  a  society 

aiming  at  righteousness  and  right.     As  Christians 
[109] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

we  think  from  a  centre.  The  centre  is  the  Kingdom 
of  God.  That  great  conception  is  not  an  abstraction 
nor  is  it  a  mere  picture,  however  vivid,  of  the  things 
that  shall  come  to  pass  on  the  Last  Day.  It  is  a 
present  force.  Indeed,  it  is  the  supreme  moralizing 
force,  giving  form  and  color  to  our  being  and  our 
motives.  The  Captain  of  our  salvation  has  founded 
the  Kingdom  within  our  nature  and  in  our  midst. 
He  has  made  fellowship  the  test  of  religion.  In  the 
deep  of  human  fellowship,  the  innermost  reality, 
mental  and  moral  and  spiritual,  is  found.  And  the 
last  word  about  reality  is  the  self -revelation  of  God. 
The  Supreme  Person  reveals  Himself  in  the  hearts  of 
redeemed  persons  and  gives  them  the  grace  and  power 
wherewith  they  stand  up  to  their  great  task  without 
flinching. 

Here,  then,  we  test  our  theories  of  truth.  Here  we 
standardize  our  weights  and  measures  and  values. 
Our  unit  of  thought  and  feeling  is  the  creative  will  in 
the  breast  of  the  Christian,  the  will  that  realizes  the 
ideal  of  fellowship  and  sets  up  in  the  heart  of  man  a 
Law  whose  authority  and  appeal  cannot  be  withstood. 
[110] 


FORGIVENESS  AND  LAW 

A  living  will  that  makes  room  within  itself  for  other 
wills,  safeguarding  their  individuality,  insuring  their 
growth  and  perfection,  —  that  is  the  pith  and  marrow 
of  rteal  Law,  whether  human  or  divine. 

Under  these  conditions  we  have  to  think  of  God 
as  the  sovereign  will,  having  His  seat  and  throne  in 
the  heart  of  man.  God  is  in  His  Heaven.  But  the 
revelation  by  which  we  know  Him  is  history.  The 
heavenly-minded  man  is  not  to  turn  monk.  He  is 
to  keep  his  station  within  the  historical  life  of  the 
nation  and  the  race  and  hold  up  before  it  the  inspir- 
ing and  invigorating  vision  of  perfect  neighborliness. 
God  is  the  creator  of  true  society,  — this  is  our  deepest 
word  about  Him.  And  the  people  who  are  redeemed 
by  Christ  from  vanity  and  fear  give  their  desires  and 
prayers  and  labors  to  the  building  up  of  a  majestic 
corporate  will  and  purpose,  through  which  the  living 
God  reveals  His  mind  and  publishes  His  judgments. 

This  is  our  thinking-place.     Here  we  take  up  our 

fixed  position  in  hope  of  seeing  the  Atonement  rooted 

in  the  nature  of  God  and  man.     The  problem  of  Law 

and  the  mystery  of  life  force  us  into  the  fact  and  mystery 

[111] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

of  corporate  being  and  good  as  a  final  view  of  things. 
This  is  the  proving-ground  of  all  our  thoughts  about 
Law.  Deep  as  is  our  debt  to  the  scientist,  we  cannot 
take  from  him  our  regulative  ideas  on  the  subject. 
In  the  majesty  of  Natural  Law  we  see  the  majesty  of 
God.  But  the  final  conception  must  come  from  the 
deep  of  human  nature  and  human  need.  Even  the 
judge  and  the  jurist  cannot  guide  us  to  our  goal. 
Our  proving-ground  is  that  tract  and  portion  of  our 
experience  where  good  society  actually  exists  and 
where  fellowship  as  an  ideal  is  under  the  spur  of 
fellowship  as  a  fact.  In  true  friendship  and  in  the 
holy  family  our  final  conception  is  given  us. 

Starting  here,  we  can  keep  the  controlling  thought 
steadily  in  view.  We  must  hold  ourselves  close  to 
this,  else  our  reasoning  will  lack  coherence  and  cogency. 
In  our  time  the  clarity  of  Christian  consciousness  and 
reason  is  being  threatened  from  two  quarters.  The 
first  is  the  visible  Universe  coming  upon  us  day  by 
day  with  the  force  of  a  new  discovery.  Physical  law 
knows  nothing  and  can  know  nothing  about  forgive- 
ness. Its  whole  meaning  is  expressed  in  the  sequence 
[112] 


FORGIVENESS  AND  LAW 

of  cause  and  eflfect.  Human  actions,  brought  under 
the  sway  of  natural  laws,  leave  as  little  place  for  the 
divine  forgiveness  as  the  movements  of  the  stars  and 
the  process  of  the  tides.  The  second  source  of  the 
confusion  is  India,  whose  religious  views  are  begin- 
ning to  exert  an  increasing  influence.  In  the  re- 
ligious consciousness  of  India,  so  far  as  it  is  reflective 
and  mature,  forgiveness  plays  no  considerable  part. 
The  final  statement  is  a  moral  and  spiritual  law  which 
has  the  same  sort  of  inevitableness  as  the  laws  of  the 
material  Universe.  The  divine  forgiveness  has  no 
place. 

To  hasty  thinkers  the  testimony  of  science  and  the 
testimony  of  India  seem  to  be  one.  But  in  fact, 
whatever  may  be  the  present  opinions  of  scientists, 
science  as  a  mood  and  attitude  bears  our  minds  toward 
a  different  conclusion.  When  the  scientist  outgrows 
the  youthful  habit  of  living  on  the  earnings  of  his 
ancestors,  when  he  makes  himself  directly  responsible 
for  the  being  and  well-being  of  the  free  State,  he  must 
disclaim  close  kinship  with  India  in  matters  of  re- 
ligion. Without  the  free  State  his  science  perishes. 
I  [113] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

When  he  opens  his  heart  to  religion,  it  must  be  a 
religion  which  makes  personality  its  stake.  He  will 
turn,  not  to  Buddha,  but  to  Jesus. 

No  wonder  that  increasing  numbers  of  people  in 
our  midst  believe  the  view  of  India  to  be  superior  in 
point  of  moralizing  power  and  value.  So  gross  have 
been  the  perversions  of  Christian  doctrine,  so  grievous 
the  popular  abuses  of  the  doctrine  of  forgiveness,  that 
honest  folk  may  well  be  pardoned  for  regarding  that 
doctrine  as  overclouding  the  majesty  of  the  Moral  Law, 
as  weakening  or  disabling  the  penetrating  power  of 
conscience.  But  it  is  poor  reasoning  to  judge  a  great 
body  of  thought  by  its  abuses.  The  Christian  view 
of  reality  stands  or  falls  as  a  whole.  Its  stake  and 
prize  is  the  principle  of  individuality.  And  it  so 
conceives  of  individuality  that  fellowship  becomes 
the  only  medium  through  which  individuality  can 
express  itself,  the  one  language  in  which  the  people 
who  are  redeemed  of  the  Lord  can  body  forth  their 
knowledge  of  the  innermost  truth  and  meaning  of 
things.  The  Hindoo,  as  in  Kipling's  story  of  Purun 
Baghat,  sacrifices  without  turning  a  hair  what  the 
[114] 


FORGIVENESS  AND  LAW 

Christian  is  most  concerned  to  preserve.  The  law  of 
individuality  carries  our  minds,  with  irresistible  logic, 
into  the  conception  of  Law  as  a  will  that  makes  room 
in  itself  for  other  wills. 

In  the  light  of  that  reiterated  conviction,  what  is 
the  relation  between  forgiveness  and  Law  ?  They  are 
integral  parts  of  a  single  conception.  The  final  Law 
is  the  living  will  of  God,  and  when  men  gainsay  or 
deny  God,  when  they  trample  the  majesty  of  the  Law 
under  foot  and  dissipate  the  meaning  and  value  of 
life,  God  must,  under  penalty  of  denying  Himself, 
reassert  the  Law.  And  what  is  more,  He  must  reassert 
it  in  the  very  place  where  it  was  broken,  namely,  the 
consciousness  and  conscience  of  the  offender.  The 
God  and  Father  of  Jesus  Christ  could  never  be  con- 
tent to  thunder  the  sinner  down.  He  will  not,  by 
the  exercise  of  irresistible  power,  hurl  the  sinner 
headlong  into  Hell.  Hell,  if  that  be  all  there  is  to  it, 
is  a  confession  of  moral  inability  and  bankruptcy  on 
God's  part,  just  as  the  old-fashioned  State's  prison 
is  a  confession  of  bankruptcy  on  the  part  of  the  free 
State.  God  forgives  the  sinner.  By  the  sweetness 
[115] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

and  the  strength  of  His  grace  He  keeps  His  foothold 
within  the  will  of  the  offender.  And  so  the  sinner, 
awakening  to  the  dread  and  terror  of  his  sin,  finds  his 
will  still  enclosed  by  the  divine  will.  Thus  God 
saves  the  man  by  making  the  Moral  Law  the  very  pith 
of  the  man's  own  will.  The  divine  judgments  on  man 
are  freely  accepted  by  men,  and  gain  the  edge  and  point 
of  judgments  passed  by  men  upon  themselves.  Man 
kindles  his  own  judgment  fires.  It  is  through  for- 
giveness that  the  Law  penetrates  and  dominates  the 
inmost  being  of  free  men. 

If  God  cannot  do  as  much  as  this,  He  can  do  less 
than  we.  For  we,  when  the  sweetness  and  sanctity 
of  intimate  fellowship  have  become  the  one  real 
thing  to  us,  insist  as  on  a  matter  of  life  and  death  upon 
our  right  to  continue  to  live  our  lives  within  those  who 
grieve  us  by  their  absent-mindedness  touching  essential 
things  and  who  deeply  wound  us  by  their  infidelity 
to  our  common  ideals.  Let  this  right  go,  and  we  lose 
ourselves.  We  go  through  life  like  a  bird  with  a 
wounded  wing.  We  must  forgive  or  deny  ourselves, 
and  in  denying  ourselves  deny  the  ideal  of  fellowship. 
[116] 


FORGIVENESS  AND  LAW 

The  same  necessity  controls  the  divine  and  the  human 
nature.  The  Law  includes  forgiveness  as  its  method 
of  administration. 

Forgiveness  does  not  slacken  the  Law;  when  the 
Law  is  recognized  as  the  higher  will  within  the  lower 
will,  this  view  rather  gives  it  grip  and  hold  upon  the 
springs  of  character.  This  conception  of  the  Law 
gives  unity  to  all  the  commandments,  renders  morality 
a  living  body,  and  makes  sin  terrible.  It  is  from  this 
point  of  view  that  St.  James  writes  when  he  says, 
"  He  that  keepeth  the  whole  law,  and  yet  offendeth  in 
one  point,  is  guilty  of  all."  For  the  Law  as  he  con- 
ceives it  is  the  living  will  of  God.  God's  will  is  not 
a  moral  code,  but  a  personal  presence  in  man's  heart. 
When  a  man  knows  God,  his  relations  to  God  are  one. 
Touch  one  part  and  you  touch  all.  There  are  no 
fractions  in  friendship.  If  I  sin  against  my  friend  in 
a  single  detail  of  conduct,  think  a  single  ungenerous 
thought,  or  permit  myself  to  descend  for  a  moment 
into  indifference  and  neglect,  the  entire  relation  be- 
tween my  friend  and  myself  suffers.  Sin  is  not  con- 
cerned with  details  of  conduct,  but  with  the  bent 
[117] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

and  bias  of  the  will.  So,  if  a  man  sin  in  a  single 
detail,  he  has  broken  the  entire  Law.  The  man  who 
thinks  an  unclean  thought  about  one  woman  defiles 
all  womanhood  in  his  heart.  One  lie  soils  and  mud- 
dies the  whole  relationship  between  two  persons, 
unsettles  the  foundations  of  social  being.  The  Moral 
Law  is  a  unity.  Every  sin  is  a  sin  against  the  whole 
Law,  when  Law  is  received  as  the  expression  of  a 
living  will. 

So  alone  is  the  hideousness  and  horror  of  sin  put  in 
clear  light.  Forgiveness  does  not  belittle  it,  but  magni- 
fies it.  The  will  of  God  faces  sin.  What  is  to  be 
Gx>d*s  attitude  ?  How  shall  He  bear  Himself  toward 
it?  That  will  in  us  which  God  hath  made  in  His 
likeness  gives  us  the  answer.  For  when  our  friends 
sin  against  us,  we  know  there  is  but  one  thing  for  us  to 
do.  Through  forgiveness  we  must  maintain  in  the 
heart  of  the  offender  the  ideal  he  has  injured.  Not 
to  forgive  were  to  add  to  the  breach  of  the  Law  a 
still  more  fatal  breach.  If  the  innocent  party  refuses 
to  forgive,  what  has  he  done  ?  thrown  up  the  fight  for 
human  perfection  because  of  his  own  wounds.  With- 
[118] 


FORGIVENESS  AND  LAW 

out  forgiveness  the  Moral  Law,  when  recognized  as 
the  relation  between  personal  beings,  denies  itself. 

Forgiveness  is  the  self-defence  of  the  Law  under 
attack.  It  puts  forth  new  and  creative  powers.  It 
heals  its  own  wounds.  There  is  no  stint  or  limit  to 
it.  It  is  full  and  free.  The  will  of  the  offender, 
with  all  his  offences,  is  caught  up  within  the  superior, 
the  redeeming  will.  Nor  can  the  superior  will  wait 
to  be  propitiated.  Neither  by  God  nor  by  man  may 
that  be  done  and  the  Moral  Law  abide  in  its  perfection 
of  creative  force.  If  man,  sinned  against,  draws  back 
into  his  innocence,  and  waits  until  the  offender  comes 
to  himself,  he  abandons  his  Uttle  world  to  the  Devil. 
And  if  Grod,  sinned  against,  holds  Himself  aloof, 
guards  Himself  within  His  majesty  and  holiness.  He 
resigns  His  rights  of  creative  guidance.  He  gainsays 
Himself,  if  He  waits  to  be  propitiated. 

The  forgiveness  is  wrought  out  in  silence.  If  it 
publishes  itself,  it  mars  and  spoils  itself.  The  in- 
nocent friend,  in  the  secret  chamber  of  his  own  heart, 
by  forgiveness  welds  his  will  to  the  will  of  the  offender. 

And  God,  in  the  silence  of  His  own  infinitude,  through 
[119] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

His  free  and  unwearying  grace  knits  His  will  to  the 
will  of  sinning  man. 

Forgiveness  goes  before  punishment  and  so  makes 
punishment  efficient.  The*  Law  becomes  a  self- 
executing  Law.  The  guilty  one  becomes  his  own 
judge  and  dooms  himself.  In  parents  and  teachers 
the  Moral  Law  becomes  through  love  the  other  self, 
the  larger  self  of  children  and  scholars.  So  when 
punishment  must  be  inflicted,  the  oflFender  becomes  a 
co-assessor.  Shall  God  be  outdone  in  educational 
methods  by  His  creatures?  Nay,  our  conception 
of  the  Moral  Law  in  its  beauty  is  but  the  reflection  of 
His  holy  will.  He  forgives  us  in  order  to  make 
our  punishment  thorough;  His  judgments  pierce  us 
through.  If  morality  were  an  abstract  code,  God 
would  stand  helpless  before  sin.  But  morality  is 
not  a  code.  It  is  the  creative  will,  the  will  of  God 
making  men  in  His  image.  The  divine  forgiveness 
reinstates  the  Law  within  the  will  of  the  offender. 
Punishment  becomes  efficient.  The  father  must  live 
within  his  boy  if  he  is  to  punish  him.     God  must 

maintain  His  life  within  the  sinner,  else  His  punish- 
[120] 


FORGIVENESS  AND  LAW 

ments  go  wide.  But  the  will  of  the  sinner  who  has 
been  forgiven  and  redeemed  is  transformed  into  the 
judgment  seat.  The  voice  that  condemns  is  the  man's 
own  voice.     He  cannot  escape  himself. 

Forgiveness  alone  makes  a  full  repentance  possible. 
It  was  the  presence  of  Christ,  the  Perfect  Life,  in  the 
house  of  the  tax-gatherer  that  enabled  him  to  stand 
up  in  noble  shame  and  confess  his  sins.  So  the  free 
forgiveness  of  God  enables  the  sinner  to  repent. 

Through  forgiveness  God  triumphantly  asserts  the 
majesty  of  the  Moral  Law,  not  in  Heaven,  but  in  our 
hearts.  His  perfect  and  changeless  will  takes  up  into 
itself  our  sinful  and  wandering  wills.  It  is  when  we 
have  sinned  against  Him  and  been  forgiven  that  we 
enter  into  the  full  joy  and  wonder  of  our  intimacy  with 
Him.  By  faith  in  His  perfection  and  in  His  redemp- 
tive purpose  toward  us  our  will,  finding  itself  within 
His  will,  is  steadied  and  renewed. 

This  is  the  meaning  of  justification  by  faith.     We 

do  grievous  injury  to  a  supreme  conception,  when  we 

think  of  justification   as  a   process  going  on  solely 

between  us  and  God,  a  purely  religious  process  iso- 

[121] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

lated  and  detached  from  everyday  human  business. 
For  in  truth  it  is  a  universal  human  process.  Where 
men  and  women  go  deep  into  life,  it  becomes  as 
much  a  matter  of  course  as  the  law  of  gravitation. 
Suppose  that  my  friends  believe  greatly  in  me.  How 
they  can  think  so  highly  of  me  passes  my  understand- 
ing. Yet  I  must  needs  rise  by  faith  to  their  estimate 
of  me.  Their  ideal  of  me  is  far  above  me,  yet  it  is  I. 
I  am  justified  by  faith  in  their  faith. 

But  while  justification  is  a  deeply  human  process, 
just  for  that  reason  it  finds  its  ground  and  explanation 
in  God.  God  through  Christ  makes  a  supreme 
oflfer  to  man.  He  holds  out  to  man  the  offer  of  human 
perfection,  personal  and  social.  The  appeal  of 
Christ  pierces  our  hearts.  Sinners  that  we  are, 
we  assent  by  faith  to  God's  great  proposal,  we  accept 
His  offer.  And  then,  it  is  not  an  artificial  and  arbitrary 
law,  but  a  natural  and  necessary  law,  that  makes  the 
perfection  of  Christ  our  second  nature.  In  justifica- 
tion by  faith  as  friendship  knows  it,  my  friends'  ideal 
of  me  becomes  my  real  self.  In  justification  by  faith 
as  God  ordains  it,  the  sinful  and  wandering  will  of 
[122] 


FORGIVENESS  AND  LAW 

man  is  caught  up  into  the  holy  and  omnipotent  will 
of  God.  The  perfection  of  Christ  becomes  the  at- 
tribute and  property  of  those  who  believe  in  Him. 
The  creative  will  of  God  houses  itself  within  the 
struggling  will.  Justification  is  the  enabling  action 
of  God  whereby  it  becomes  possible  for  sinful  and 
wavering  men  to  hold  fast  to  their  belief  in  the  best, 
their  faith  in  perfect  fellowship. 

Thus  the  supreme  problem,  the  problem  of  Law, 
is  finally  solved.  The  Christian  gives  his  will  to  God, 
and  God  endows  the  Christian's  will  with  radiant 
energy.  Every  believer  in  Jesus  gives  his  life  and  will 
to  God  in  order  that  God  may  speak  His  mind  to  men. 
All  true  Christians  cast  their  desires  and  plans  in  a 
common  mould.  Through  mutual  reverence,  through 
restraint  and  service,  they  earn  the  freedom  of  God's 
City,  claim  and  exercise  the  right  to  live  within  one 
another.  So  by  means  of  a  common  aim  and  common 
prayer  they  create  a  corporate  being  and  will.  Out 
of  this  corporate  will,  with  a  power  that  grows  as  the 
generations  succeed  one  another  on  the  earth,  is  pub- 
lished and  proclaimed  the  Moral  Law  for  the  nations. 
[123] 


CHAPTER   rX 


THE   ATONING    LIFE 


THE  road  we  have  taken  to  bring  us  to  our 
subject  may  seem  long  and  devious.  But  if  we 
are  to  have  in  these  days  a  view  of  the  Atone- 
ment that  shall  stir  the  emotions  and  quicken  the 
pulse,  we  must  make  sure  of  our  line  of  approach. 
The  art  of  putting  a  great  question  is  quite  as  im- 
portant as  the  question  itself.  To  many  of  us  the 
old  view  of  the  Atonement  no  longer  appeals.  How, 
then,  shall  we  conceive  it,  that  we  may  make  it  in- 
evitable? For  inevitable  it  must  be,  if  it  is  to  be 
worth  our  while.  Therefore  to  get  the  right  line  of 
approach  has  been  our  aim  thus  far. 

The  logic  of  life  has  brought  us  to  this  position. 

The  pith  of  divine  and  human  reality  is  the  creative 

will   that   founds   and   upholds   good    society.     This 

will  is  the  spring  and  source  of  Law.     The  aim  of 

[124] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

the  Law  is  the  individuality  of  those  whom  it  governs. 
Its  method  is  a  restraint  on  the  part  of  the  lawmaker 
which  is  commensurate  with  his  power.  Power, 
taken  by  itself,  even  though  it  be  omnipotent  power, 
is  not  moral,  nor  can  it  master  moral  beings.  It  can 
crush  and  silence  the  weaker  power.  But  it  cannot 
interpret  and  convince.  The  end  of  the  Law  is  in- 
dividuality or  freedom.  Reverence  for  individuality 
and  the  restraint  that  grows  from  it  is  the  primary 
quality  amongst  those  who  seek  to  build  the  Kingdom 
of  God,  that  is  to  say,  the  commonwealth  of  man. 
The  fellowship  of  free  men,  each  possessed  of  infinite 
value  in  the  eyes  of  all,  is  the  moral  ideal,  the  essence 
of  the  Moral  Law.  In  the  nature  and  will  of  God, 
as  God's  Christ  and  God's  Word  reveal  Him,  the  Law 
is  grounded.  Impossible  as  it  sometimes  seems  to 
believe  it,  restraint  is  as  deep  in  God  as  power.  By 
the  divine  restraint  an  open  space  is  cleared  within 
the  infinitude  and  eternity  of  being.  And  in  that  space, 
with  the  everlasting  arms  around  us,  we  grow  up  into 
self-knowledge    and    self-mastery.     Made    like    God, 

we    mingle    restraint    with    our    power.     We    would 
[125] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

rather  lose  our  own  souls  than  so  assert  our  rights  as 
to  injure  the  rights  of  others.  And  when  we  have 
once  tasted  of  this  salvation,  when,  ourselves  redeemed, 
we  live  the  redeeming  life,  we  find  that  not  for  one 
hour  can  we  live  to  ourselves  or  by  ourselves.  We 
live,  if  we  truly  live,  unto  the  Lord.  We  live  with 
our  fellow-believers  in  divine  and  human  goodness. 
All  of  us  together  put  our  being  into  a  corporate  being, 
our  interests  into  a  common  hope,  our  wills  into  a 
corporate  will.  God's  holy  will,  working  through  this 
personal  and  corporate  will,  grounds  the  Law  and 
publishes  the  Law. 

When  the  Law  that  guards  the  ideal  of  perfect 
human  fellowship  is  broken,  when  one  human  will 
sins  against  another  human  will  or  against  the  divine 
will,  our  minds  are  shut  up  to  one  course  of  action. 
The  creative  will  in  God  and  man,  facing  sin,  is  forced 
by  its  own  constitution  and  nature  to  forgive  sin. 
The  forgiveness  must  be  full  and  free.  It  cannot  wait 
for  propitiation.  It  will  not  deal  in  halfway  measures. 
It  must  be  free,  else  the  nature  of  the  Law  is  denied. 
It  must  be  full,  because  only  so  can  the  belief  in 
[126] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

fellowship  triumph  over  the  sin  that  assails  it.  The 
essence  of  sin  is  the  breach  it  makes  in  relationship, 
its  denial  of  fellowship,  its  exaltation  of  self.  The 
essence  of  the  Law  is  relationship  and  fellowship. 
So  then  a  forgiveness  that  is  full  and  free  is  the  one 
course  of  action  open  to  the  stewards  and  guardians 
of  the  Law.  Only  in  this  way  can  the  innocent  and 
holy  will  assert  its  right  to  go  on  living  within  the 
sinful  and  offending  will.  Law,  as  the  Christian's 
experience  forces  him  to  think  of  it,  here  discloses  its 
inmost  nature.  Forgiveness  is  the  self-defence  of  the 
Law  when  its  majesty  is  assailed  and  the  ideal  under- 
lying it  denied.  Forgiveness  is  the  inevitable  action 
of  that  holy  will  which  is  the  source  of  moral  sanity 
and  cleansing  criticism,  when  the  selfishness  and 
vulgarity  of  mankind  strive  to  make  true  society 
impossible. 

The  fact  of  forgiveness  is,  then,  the  prerogative 
and  critical  fact  in  which  the  genius  of  the  Moral  Law 
shines  out  with  convincing  power  and  beauty.  But 
what  is  the  full  scope  of  the  fact?  What  are  our 
findings,  when  we  take  deep  soundings  of  the  fact  ? 
[127] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

Within  forgiveness  the  Atonement  as  a  process  and  an 
action  is  partly  hidden  and  partly  revealed.  For  the 
revelation  is  only  in  part.  In  the  very  nature  of  things 
this  must  be  so.  Every  fact  which  is  large  enough  to 
have  permanent  standing  before  reason  becomes  a 
mystery  and  a  problem.  And  the  fact  of  forgiveness, 
the  ultimate  fact  under  the  conception  of  Law,  neces- 
sarily opens  into  mystery.  The  traditional  name  for 
that  mystery  is  Atonement. 

Atonement  and  forgiveness  are  not  two  facts  re- 
lated to  one  another  as  cause  and  effect.  When  we 
so  conceive  them,  we  make  artificial  diflBiculties  for 
reason.  They  do  not  constitute  a  sequence  in  time. 
If  we  put  them  in  that  light,  we  are  bound  to  mistake 
the  inmost  meaning  of  both.  The  Atonement  is 
the  secret  of  forgiveness,  the  process  and  action  of  the 
living  will  which  through  forgiveness  publishes  the 
moral  Law,  not  on  Sinai,  but  in  the  heart  of  the 
offender.  Atonement  and  forgiveness  must  not,  even 
for  a  moment,  be  separated  in  our  thought.  They 
constitute  an  indivisible  action  which  we  may  describe 
from  different  positions,  but  which  we  cannot,  without 
[128] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

fatally  injuring  the  unity  of  Christian  experience,  take 
apart  in  our  analysis  or  separate  in  our  doctrine. 

Atonement  is  not  an  arbitrary  action.  "When  we 
get  a  clear  view  of  the  divine  nature,  we  see  that 
the  Atonement  is  necessary  for  God.  Without  it  He 
would  deny  Himself,  and  resign  His  place  as  the  Holy 
and  Creative  One  whose  nature  and  whose  will  are 
the  ground  and  reason  of  the  Moral  Law.  God  must 
forgive  sin,  God  must  make  atonement  for  sin.  Other- 
wise He  is  not  the  God  and  Father  of  our  Saviour, 
it  is  not  His  word  that  comes  to  us  when  Jesus  says, 
"  Blessed  are  the  peacemakers,  for  they  shall  be  called 
the  children  of  God." 

The  Atonement  is  not  a  process  peculiar  to  God. 
On  the  contrary,  it  springs  from  the  very  nature  and 
constitution  of  the  creative  life  in  all  its  forms.  It 
belongs  to  the  frame  of  moral  government.  In  some 
sense,  it  is  a  universal  human  process.  And  the  hope 
of  our  acquiring  a  vital  hold  on  the  divine  atonement  in 
Christ  lies  in  a  clear  apprehension  of  this  universal 
quality.  Let  us  suppose  that  we  are,  in  deed  and  in 
truth,  followers  of  Jesus,  that  we  have  His  mind  and 
K  [  129  ] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

make  His  plan  our  personal  rule  of  life.  Thanks  to 
Him,  the  Kingdom  of  God  is  not  up  in  the  clouds. 
It  is  as  real  as  politics  and  trade.  In  the  strength  of 
His  life  we  ask  ourselves,  Who  is  my  neighbor  ?  And 
of  ourselves,  inspired  by  Him,  we  answer.  It  is  the  man 
and  the  woman  farthest  away  from  us,  between 
whom  and  ourselves  yawns  the  deepest  gulf  of  prej- 
udice and  tradition.  We  make  ourselves  morally 
responsible  for  our  world.  With  our  life's  blood  we 
sign  an  immense  bond.  We  will  carry  the  law  of 
human  fellowship  into  every  part  of  human  experi- 
ence. 

And  then  —  what  befalls  us  ?  Wounds  come  to  us 
from  all  sides.  We  give  hurts  to  our  dearest  friends 
and  they  give  hurts  to  us.  The  world  is  filled  with 
breaches  of  the  law  of  fellowship.  We  can  insure 
ourselves  after  a  fashion  by  shaping  some  kind  of  an 
aristocracy.  We  can  build  a  high  wall  around  a 
certain  portion  of  social  being.  Inside  the  pale  we 
find  our  peers,  between  whom  and  us  social  obligation 
is  strong.  Outside  the  pale  is  a  less  binding  form  of 
social  obligation.  But  the  insurance  is  very  imperfect. 
[130] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

Within  the  pale  private  war  in  many  forms  is  carried 
on.  If  I  am  to  be  with  all  my  strength  a  member  of 
society,  I  must  view  even  this  limited  and  sometimes 
extremely  insignificant  portion  of  social  existence  in 
the  light  of  its  relation  to  the  Kingdom  of  God.  All 
the  pains  and  hurts  my  social  life  can  bring  me  I  must 
take  up  into  the  creative  will  within  my  heart. 

But  when  I  do  that,  the  pale  is  down.  If  it  is  only 
by  viewing  my  so-called  peers  in  the  light  our  Lord 
has  brought  into  the  world  that  I  can  play  my  part  as 
a  member  of  good  society,  then  the  ground  of  peculiar 
privilege  is  cut  from  under  my  feet.  A  social  pale  no 
longer  exists.  True  fellowship,  if  it  exists  at  all,  is 
universal. 

Fellowship,  when  we  enter  into  it  with  our  whole 
being,  both  reveals  and  conceals  the  Atonement. 
Conceals  it,  because  the  atoning  life  that  makes  good 
the  breaches  in  the  Moral  Law  works  silently,  in  the 
deep  of  life ;  it  is  never  on  the  surface,  the  sound  of  its 
operation  is  never  heard  in  the  streets.  Reveals  it, 
because  whenever  we  get  down  to  the  foundations  of 
fellowship,  we  find  the  fact  of  the  Atonement,  the 

[131] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

divine  and  human  necessity  of  it.  If  we  discard  for 
a  while  all  specific  theories  about  the  Atonement; 
and  if,  going  farther  in  our  desire  to  keep  inside  our 
actual  knowledge,  we  even  disuse  for  a  time  the 
specific  term  "  atonement  '*  and  substitute  a  general 
phrase,  then  our  best  experience  goes  into  the  con- 
viction that  the  atoning  life  lies  at  the  roots  of  good 
society. 

My  friend  and  I  —  if  I  sin  against  him,  what  shall 
he  do?  Stand  on  his  dignity?  Shut  himself  up 
within  his  innocence  ?  Nurse  his  wound  until  it 
festers  ?  Leave  me  to  myself  to  find  out  my  fault  in 
all  its  grievousness  and  then  come  to  him  confessing 
my  sin?  Imprisoned  within  his  goodness,  he  makes 
himself  an  egotist,  caring  more  for  his  hurts  than  for 
the  majesty  of  the  Moral  Law  which  shines  forth  so 
clearly  in  friendship.  If  he  stays  long  within  his  self- 
made  prison,  his  goodness  will  become  the  goodness 
of  a  prig.  But  he  dare  not  shut  himself  within  his 
consciousness  of  innocence.  Only  by  taking  the 
shame  of  my  sin  as  his  own,  by  gladly  bearing  the 
pain  it  gives  him,  can  he  be  true  to  himself.  In 
[132] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

healing  silence  he  makes  atonement  to  the  ideal  of 
friendship  in  his  heart,  makes  atonement  for  my  sin, 
and  so  makes  good  my  breach  in  the  Moral  Law. 

What  shall  the  father  do  when  his  boy  transgresses  ? 
Let  his  fatherhood  be  what  it  ought  to  be,  the  finest 
form  of  comradeship.  In  the  fullest  sense  he  lives 
his  life  within  his  boy's  life.  He  uses  his  vantage- 
ground  of  years  and  experience,  not  as  a  judgment-seat 
on  some  little  Sinai  from  which  to  thunder  at  his  boy, 
but  as  an  interpreter  who  seeks  to  lead  the  boy  into 
clear  self-knowledge  and  self-mastery.  With  the 
uttermost  reverence  he  treats  his  boy's  right  to  himself. 
And  in  proportion  to  his  reverence  is  his  intimacy. 
The  mystery  of  intimacy  is  not  for  those  who  dominate 
others,  but  for  those  who  treat  others  of  their  peers. 
The  father,  true  comrade  to  his  boy,  ruling  him  by 
reverence  and  through  interpretation  of  life,  —  when 
his  boy  grievously  transgresses,  what  shall  he  do? 
He  makes  the  shame  of  the  sin  his  own.  His  grief 
over  it  is  keener  than  his  boy's  can  possibly  be,  because 
he  knows  far  more  of  the  forces  of  evil.  He  knows 
how  sin  breeds  sins.  Looking  into  the  depths  of  Satan 
[13S] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

in  society  and  in  his  own  heart,  his  boy's  transgression 
racks  him  with  pain.  But  he  does  not  substitute 
a  sermon  for  sympathy.  He  takes  the  shame  of  the 
sin  as  his  own  shame.  He  makes  atonement  for  his 
son  to  the  Law  whose  seat  is  within  his  will. 

In  society  at  large  the  same  order  of  experience 
holds.  The  personal  life  and  the  corporate  life  are 
inseparable.  In  proportion  to  our  growth  in  self- 
knowledge  and  self-mastery  is  our  need  of  self-ex- 
pression in  terms  of  fellowship.  This  involves  an 
increasing  measure  of  social  sympathy  and  social 
responsibility.  A  great-hearted  American  is  cut  to 
the  heart  by  America's  shortcomings.  Her  sins 
against  the  ideal  of  democracy  and  justice  are  felt 
like  personal  wounds.  When  an  American  who  has 
an  immense  fortune  breaks  through  the  laws  that 
catch  and  hold  the  American  who  is  without  fortune, 
he  himself  suffers  outrage.  By  bearing  the  pains  and 
shame  of  the  nation's  life  as  his  own,  he  makes  atone- 
ment to  the  national  ideal  in  his  heart.  And  so  his 
criticism  of  his  nation  becomes  cleansing  and  creative 
criticism.  Because  he  lives  the  atoning  life,  he  has 
[134] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

the  right  to  judge.     And  his  judgments  have  pene- 
trating and  renovating  power. 

The  Atonement  is  the  price  paid  by  God  and  man 
for  the  right  to  forgive.  Our  right  to  forgive  is  an 
ultimate  and  basic  right.  It  is  inseparable  from  our 
high  position  as  stewards  and  administrators  of  the 
Moral  Law.  When  we  become  persons,  we  become,  to 
use  Aristotle's  fine  phrase,  unwritten  laws,  the  seat  and 
source  of  the  living  law  that  sways  and  guides  the 
passions  of  mankind.  As  freemen  we  administer  the 
law  for  freemen.  Our  right  to  forgive  is  a  supreme 
right.  Without  it  we  cannot  efficiently  administer 
and  execute  the  Moral  Law.  We  forgive  in  order  to 
carry  out  the  Law,  incarnate  it  in  the  lives  of  sinful 
men  and  make  it  self -executing.  For  this  our  sovereign 
right  we  are  willing  and  eager  to  pay  a  proportionate 
price.  We  live  the  atoning  life  and  bear  atoning  pains. 
Dare  we  presume  to  know  God's  inner  nature? 
How  poorly  we  know  ourselves !  We  have  hardly 
more  than  the  promise  of  personality.  But  in  the 
light  of  that  promise  we  live  and  work,  strong  to  do 
and  strong  to  bear,  waiting  for  the  perfect  day.  Our 
[135] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

knowledge  of  ourselves  comes  to  us  transfigured  by 
the  knowledge  of  God  which  shines  through  it.  It  is 
His  self -revelation  that  gives  unity  and  sanity,  meaning 
and  power,  to  our  experience.  The  little  candle  of 
self-knowledge  in  us  is  the  candle  of  the  Lord.  We 
dare  to  take  the  mystery  of  things  upon  us.  We  dare 
to  speak,  not  as  God's  spies,  but  as  God's  friends. 
Nay,  we  dare  not  be  silent.  We  should  deny  God 
and  shame  ourselves  if  we  did  not  say  that  the  aton- 
ing life  is  a  necessity  for  God.  It  is  not  an  arbitrary 
action  hanging  upon  His  sovereign  and  inscrutable 
will.  It  is  an  eternal  process  of  His  nature.  His  will 
and  being  are  the  Moral  Law.  When  we  sin  against 
His  will  and  transgress  His  commandments,  it  is  no 
more  possible  for  Him  than  for  us  to  wait  to  be  pro- 
pitiated. He  works  out  His  own  propitiation.  He 
makes  atonement  to  Himself.  We  have  no  share  nor 
part  in  it.  It  is  all  His  own.  He  lives  the  atoning 
life  within  the  wills  of  His  sinful  children.  So  he 
asserts  His  right  to  forgive.  In  our  hearts  He  publishes 
afresh  the  Moral  Law,  which  is  His  holy  will.  And 
His  judgments  become  a  two-edged  sword,  piercing 

[136] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

even  to  the  dividing  asunder  of  soul  and  spirit  and  of 
the  joints  and  marrow,  and  a  discerner  of  the  thoughts 
and  intents  of  the  heart. 

Christ  so  masters  our  conscience  and  interprets  our 
life  that  we  place  Him  between  God  and  ourselves. 
It  is  the  essence  of  our  faith  that  in  seeing  Him  we 
see  God.  Through  His  humanity  we  feel  and  know 
the  Deity.  We  outgrow  the  mystic's  plan  to  transcend 
the  human  in  order  to  get  clear  and  saving  vision  of 
the  divine.  To  our  youthful  experience  it  seemed  a 
brave  plan,  and  upon  it  we  built  many  a  philosophi- 
cal scheme.  But  having  grown  up  to  Christ,  we 
have  reduced  our  childish  thoughts  to  nothing.  We 
look  in  His  face  and  hear  Him  say,  as  He  said  to 
Philip,  "  Have  I  been  so  long  a  time  with  you  and  yet 
you  have  not  known  me?"  Neither  beneath  Him 
nor  above  Him  nor  around  Him  but  through  Him 
do  we  go  to  the  abiding  reality  and  meaning  of  life. 
The  power  and  appeal  of  His  Person  holds  us  fast  in 
our  station.  Through  His  humanity  alone  can  we 
see  the  Deity.  He  sets  us  our  task.  We  intend  to 
realize  the  Kingdom  of  God  in  terms  of  human 
[137] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

fellowship.  He  gives  us  our  strength  and  confidence. 
We  go  about  our  great  task  with  never  a  thought  of 
failure.  Heaven  does  not  distract  us,  but  rather  stead- 
ies our  aim.  We  are  in  the  world  with  all  our  might. 
But  our  being  is  from  God.  We  are  God*s  fellow- 
laborers.  He  and  we  together  are  building  good 
society.  Through  our  wills  knitting  together  into  a 
corporate  will  He  gives  to  the  world  its  Law.  And 
through  our  lives  He  takes  the  world's  sin  upon  Him- 
self and  makes  atonement  for  it. 

The  atoning  life  of  God  is  an  organic  process  within 
His  creative  unity.  When  we  put  the  question  in 
the  right  way,  the  answer  to  it  is  as  inevitable  as  the 
laws  of  nature.  God's  place  of  self -revelation  is  in 
the  depth  of  the  common  life  and  lot,  its  glorifying 
wants  and  ennobling  hopes.  Here  He  speaks  His 
saving  words.  Standing  in  this  place,  the  thoughts 
of  the  Apostles  become  our  personal  thoughts.  "God 
was  in  Christ,  reconciling  the  world  unto  Himself, 
not  imputing  their  trespasses  unto  them:  and  hath 
committed  unto  us  the  word  of  reconciliation  ** 
(2  Cor.  V.  19).  Without  any  connection  with  our 
[138] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

merits  and  deserts  God  exhibited  in  our  midst  the  life 
and  death  of  Christ  as  a  place  of  atonement,  a  meet- 
ing-place between  God  and  man  (Rom.  iii.  21-25). 
Hither  comes  the  sinful,  wandering  will  of  man, 
doubting  human  perfection,  despairing  about  the 
supreme  hope.  And  here  in  Christ  man  sees  his  will 
taken  up  into  the  mystery  and  unity  of  the  divine  will. 
He  appropriates  as  his  own  the  words  of  St.  John, 
"We  have  fellowship  one  with  another,  and  the  blood 
of  Jesus  Christ,  God's  Son,  cleanses  us  from  all  sin.'* 


[139] 


CHAPTER  X 

THE   HEALING   QUESTION 

IN  a  great  crisis  of  English  politics  Sir  Harry 
Vane  published  a  plan  of  political  reform 
under  the  title  "The  Healing  Question.** 
I  venture  to  borrow  it  and  apply  it  to  the  fact  and 
mystery  of  the  Atonement,  to  indicate  its  bearing  upon 
our  lives  when  we  take  our  experience  in  its  entire 
scope. 

We  have  reached  our  goal.  The  word  "atone- 
ment '*  was  purposely  avoided  in  the  statement  of  the 
theme,  because  it  has  been  applied  for  many  centuries 
to  the  work  of  Christ  in  dealing  with  sin.  The  Person 
of  Christ  in  its  full  relation  to  human  experience  and 
hope  on  the  one  side,  to  divine  being  and  power  on 
the  other,  is  the  subject  of  systematic  theology.  "With 
the  Atonement  as  wrought  out  in  Christ  we  are  not 
concerned  except  in  so  far  as  it  is  the  fulfilment  of 
[140] 


THE  HEALING  QUESTION 

the  logic  of  the  common  life.  It  is  the  atoning  life  in 
God  and  man  that  has  been  the  subject  of  our  study. 

We  have  sought  to  make  clear  the  line  of  study 
which  may  render  the  Atonement  a  living  doctrine, 
quick  with  appeal  and  inspiration.  We  have  found 
the  centre  of  interest  and  attention.  It  is  that  dis- 
covery which  makes  a  student.  The  real  student  in 
any  field  is  not  the  man  who  knows,  but  the  man 
whom  some  specific  question,  drawing  and  riveting  his 
attention,  puts  under  heavy  bonds,  so  that  at  all  costs 
he  seeks  for  knowledge.  Even  so  in  this  field.  If 
the  atoning  life  is  once  seen  to  be  a  necessary  process 
and  action  for  all  who  would  live  nobly,  then  they  are 
bound  to  trace  the  atoning  life  to  its  roots  and  to  find 
its  intelligible  ground  in  the  being  and  will  of  God. 

The  supreme  problem,  as  we  have  seen,  is  Law. 
Religion  is  our  deepest  need,  not  only  because  we  can- 
not save  our  souls  from  deadly  fears  in  any  other  way, 
but  because  religion  alone  can  bring  our  minds  to 
rest  upon  a  solid  ground  for  Law.  The  Christian 
religion  owes  its  enduring  supremacy  in  the  world 
to  the  way  in  which  it  answers  the  problem.  The 
[141] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

self-revelation  of  the  Divine  Unity  gives  unity  and 
sanity  to  man's  experience.  And  the  incorporation 
of  the  Divine  Unity  in  a  supreme  Person  gives  the 
Divine  Unity  irresistible  power. 

An  immense  gain  is  secured  for  clarity  of  thought 
and  straightforwardness  in  action  when  the  whole 
debate  regarding  reality  and  life  can  be  summed  up 
in  one  decisive  proposition.  That  proposition,  as 
the  Christian  puts  it  when  his  consciousness  is  clear, 
runs  thus:  The  whole  being  and  power  of  God,  the 

innermost  being  of  things,  and  the  uttermost  resources 

li 

;  of  the  invisible  Universe  are  pledged  to  the  realization 

of  the  Kingdom  of  God. 

This  proposition  determines  the  centre  of  gravity 
in  our  thought  about  things.  It  is  not  the  inner  being 
of  God  except  in  so  far  as  God  Himself  reveals  Him- 
self to  us.  It  is  the  fact  and  mystery  of  human  unity, 
through  which  alone  the  Divine  Unity  is  fittingly 
revealed.  In  Rom.  ix-xi  and  in  the  Epistle  to  the 
Ephesians  this  is  wrought  out  by  St.  Paul  with  great 
force  and  beauty.  To  this  point  the  Christian  con- 
sciousness must  rigidly  hold  itself  if  it  would  think 
[142] 


THE  HEALING  QUESTION 

upon  the  Atonement  along  the  lines  of  the  Word  of 
God. 

The  proving-ground  of  this  mystery  is  not  the  cell 
of  the  monastic  mystic  nor  the  study  of  the  speculative 
theologian.  It  is  the  unity  of  a  definite  group  of  human 
beings  constituting  what  is  called  a  religious  congrega- 
tion. In  the  ethics  of  the  New  Testament,  —  in 
Rom.  xii-xv  and  in  1  John,  for  example,  —  this 
is  the  sum  and  substance  of  the  matter.  In  Phil. 
i.  27-ii.  11  the  Incarnation  is  brought  forward  in 
order  that  it  may  serve  as  the  spring  of  intense  and 
intimate  human  unity.  Mysticism  and  Philosophy 
would  be  altogether  too  easy  a  way  of  understanding 
God.  Only  they  have  the  key  to  the  divine  mysteries 
who  subject  their  whole  being  and  will  to  the  ap- 
parently impossible  task  of  realizing  the  Kingdom  of 
God. 

The  Saviour  by  His  presence  puts  all  at  stake  in 
the  question  —  Do  you  believe  in  the  Kingdom  of 
God  ?  The  grace  and  power  of  His  Person  enable  us 
to  say,  Yes,  with  my  whole  heart.  The  Christian 
consciousness,  gathering  radiant  energy  from  age  to 
[143] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

age,  grips  and  holds  us.  The  sweet  and  glorifying 
joys  of  friendship  and  the  family  life  give  us  all  a 
home-acre  where  the  union  of  the  divine  and  the 
human  is  not  an  enkindling  promise  but  a  blessed 
reality.  Christ  and  His  Church  and  life  together 
give  us  secure  standing-ground  in  a  world  whose 
apparent  forces  rage  furiously  against  Christ's  plan. 
The  Kingdom  of  God  is  within  our  reach.  This  is 
the  gladsome  and  gladdening  news,  the  joyous  and 
refreshing  story  of  God,  —  the  Gospel. 

The  Christian  is  the  only  reverent  Agnostic.  His 
agnosticism  is  a  part  of  his  experience  of  revelation. 
He  knows  the  living  God  just  enough  to  know  that  he 
is  known  and  loved  by  God.  The  creative  Unity 
of  God  in  his  heart  becomes  the  base  and  ground  of 
a  human  unity  deeper  and  more  abiding  than  all 
racial  and  national,  all  sectarian  and  social  divisions. 

When  the  Christian  finds  the  centre  of  gravity  for 

thought  and  feeling  in  the  mystery  of  human  unity, 

and  when  he  has  dedicated  his  powers  and  faculties 

and  possessions  to  the  realization  of  this  supreme 

hope,  then  he  begins  to  enter  deeply  into  the  nature 
[144] 


THE  HEALING  QUESTION 

and  meaning  of  prayer.  In  Rom.  viii.  24,  St. 
Paul  says,  It  was  for  the  supreme  hope  that  we  were 
saved.  Then  in  verse  25  he  speaks  of  what  Chrys- 
ostom  happily  called  the  queen  of  Christian  virtues, 
patience  and  stanchness,  the  large-mindedness  and 
the  long-mindedness  which  must  needs  be  the  funda- 
mental qualities  in  men  and  women  who  are  looking 
for  the  Day  of  God.  And  then  —  let  us  note  carefully 
the  sequence  of  thought  —  the  Apostle  goes  on  to 
speak  of  prayer.  We  pray  for  the  Kingdom  of  God 
as  our  dear  Lord  hath  taught  us.  But  the  inertia 
and  brutality  and  selfishness  of  human  nature  in  us 
and  about  us  makes  the  Kingdom  of  God  seem  like 
a  fairy  story  in  which  things  happened  a  long  time 
ago  or  far  away  beyond  an  impassable  sea.  With 
yearnings  and  longings  unutterable  we  strain  to  make 
it  a  present  good.  Then  within  our  hearts  the  mystery 
of  the  divine  being  is  unclosed.  Within  our  prayer 
we  hear  the  voice  of  the  Holy  Spirit.  God  praying  to 
God  !  God  pledging  Himself  to  man  !  We  go  forth 
from  our  prayers  into  a  hostile  or  indifferent  world, 
seeking  for  tasks  that  the  worldling  calls  impossible. 
L  [ 146  ] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

We  look  into  our  own  hearts  and  take  full  account 
of  our  cowardice,  our  love  of  ease,  our  infidelity,  our 
sin.  We  look  out  upon  history  and  see  rising  out  of 
its  depths,  as  the  seer  in  the  Book  of  Daniel  saw 
them,  one  form  after  another,  half  human  and  half 
brute,  visions  of  world-empire  and  world-trade.  Man 
is  a  wolf  to  man.  The  pitiful  refuge  of  the  cliflF- 
dwellers  is  in  our  view ;  the  battlefields  where  Chris- 
tians have  slaughtered  one  another ;  the  slums  where 
humanity  reeks  and  rots;  the  social  evil,  the  vilest 
among  our  manifold  disgraces ;  the  numberless  private 
griefs  and  wrongs;  the  poignant  appeal  of  human 
pain.     With  eyes  unveiled  we  see  our  world. 

But  the  pain  and  the  sin  and  the  shame  we  make 
our  own.  We  live  the  atoning  life.  We  put  our  being 
into  the  corporate  being  of  the  Church  of  Christ. 
Our  prayers  are  common  prayers.  Our  wills  inter- 
knitted  constitute  a  common  will.  And  from  that 
will  issues  the  world's  higher  law.  Here  and  there  it 
moulds  life  to  its  liking.  Here  and  there  appear 
portions  of  the  life  that  is  truly  redeemed,  where  the 
sting  of  selfishness  is  taken  from  pain  and  where  the 
[146] 


THE  HEALING  QUESTION 

corporate  will  of  man  gives  promise  of  its  power  to 
banish  evil.  We  give  ourselves  to  our  fellows  in  order 
to  know  and  master  ourselves.  We  do  not  think  of 
sacrifice  as  an  end  in  itself.  We  sacrifice  ourselves 
in  order  to  assert  ourselves  in  the  highest  way.  We 
rule  our  neighbors  by  living  in  them  and  bearing  their 
burdens.  The  atoning  life  is  our  last  word  about 
ourselves.  It  is  our  last,  our  deepest  word  about 
God.  Thanks  be  to  Him,  it  is  our  most  intimate 
obligation.  Through  Christ  and  His  fellowship  the 
being  and  beauty  of  God  speak  home  to  us.  It  is  the 
ministry  of  beauty  to  restore  and  freshen  our  con- 
fidence in  our  world.  So  long  as  the  spell  is  on  us,  the 
sincerity  of  the  universe  is  a  thing  certain  and  as- 
sured. Even  so  is  it  with  the  creative  unity  of  God  in 
Christ.  Through  the  Saviour  we  enter  upon  our 
heritage.  The  thrill  of  possession  runs  through  us. 
People  with  no  abiding  place,  who  have  somehow 
come  into  the  inheritance  of  an  old  estate,  know  what 
a  joy  it  is  to  walk  their  bounds.  The  folk  whom 
Christ  hath  redeemed  enjoy  this  thrill  of  possession 
in  its  sweetest  and  purest  form.  They  have  inherited 
[147] 


THE  ATONING  LIFE 

the  earth.  Please  God,  at  some  far-oflF  day,  — 
whether  it  be  a  hundred  years  or  a  hundred  thousand, 
it  is  not  theirs  to  think  or  say,  —  righteousness  and 
right  shall  rule  in  the  affairs  of  men.  The  sting  shall 
be  drawn  from  death  and  pain. 

Bless  us,  dear  God,  with  the  vision  of  Thy  being 
and  beauty,  that  in  the  strength  of  it  we  may  work 
without  haste  and  without  rest,  through  Jesus  Christ 
our  Lord. 


[148] 


BOOKS  OF  RELATED  INTEREST 

By  HENRY  S.    NASH 

Professor  of  New  Testament  Interpretation  in  the  Episcopal 
Theological  School  at  Cambridge 

Ethics  and  Revelation 

The  value  and  significance  of  Professor  Nash's  lectures  lie  chiefly 
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A  SELECTION  OF  THE  SERMONS  PREACHED  IN  THE  CITY  TEMPLE, 
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Professor  of  Church  History  in  Rochester  Theological  Seminary 

CHRISTIANITY  AND 

THE  SOCIAL  CRISIS  cioih,  Z2mc,  ti.50  nel 

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incisive  style ;  that  stern  passion  and  gentle  sentiment  stir  at  times 
among  the  words,  and  keen  wit  and  grim  humor  flash  here  and  there 
in  the  turn  of  a  sentence  ;  and  that  there  is  a  noble  end  in  view.  If 
the  hope  be  too  confident,  if  there  be  once  in  a  while  a  step  taken 
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It  is  a  book  to  like,  to  leam  from,  and,  though  the  theme  be  sad  and 
serious,  to  be  charmed  with."  —  JV.  Y.  Times'  Sat.  Review  of  Books. 


By  the  REV.   SHAILER  MATHEWS 

Professor  of  New  Testament  History  and  Interpretation  in  the 

University  of  Chicago 

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** .  .  .  a  most  interesting  and  valuable  contribution  to  the  literature 
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caught  the  forms  of  religious  and  scientific  knowledge  without  their 
spirit.  This  book  is  addressed  much  more  it  seems  to  the  religious 
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repentance.  Those  who  are  troubled  in  any  way  at  the  seeming  con- 
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— Evening  Post, 

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